Re: Promoting Git developers

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 12, 2015, 04:53 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqbnjy4y0t.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8D38Lx5zvpOGPvnYVNXh4EYbF+rLL8kwb9pwP7EqCqfxQ@mail.gmail.com>

Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

Show 32 quoted lines

> On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 11:16 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> ... We may want to acknowledge review efforts as well, by
>>> grepping Helped-by:, Reviewed-by:...
>>
>> Agreed. Something along the lines of
>>
>>     $ git shortlog --no-merges -s -n -t Helped-by -t Reviewed-by v2.3.0..
>
> A quick grep/uniq/sort gives this
>
>    1512     Acked-by
>     537     Reviewed-by
>     389     Reported-by
>     317     Helped-by
>     147     Tested-by
>     143     Suggested-by
>      97     Noticed-by
>      78     Improved-by
>      49     Thanks-to
>      40     Mentored-by
>      23     Requested-by
>      21     Acked-By
>      20     Inspired-by
>      18     Based-on-patch-by
>       9     Explained-by
>       9     Contributions-by
>
> It looks like people are quite creative. I think all these "*-by" (so
> -t supports wildcards) and Thanks-to: could be also considered as
> contribution.

I'd first suggest to employ "icase" to unify *-By and *-by. Perhaps we would want a recommended list somewhere in SubmittingPatches to discourage people from getting too creative?

"Acked" and "Reviewed" would be part of the normal review process.

"Reported", "Requested", "Noticed", "Suggested", "Inspired", and "Based-on-patch-by" are about where the motivation to make the change came from. They try to express modes of communication and degree of involvement of the named person in the process of germinating an idea, and the nature of the change (is it a bug or is it an improvement?), but I wonder if we can standardize these into just a few (or just one) by shedding the various nuances. If the difference these various phrases try to convey is so important, it probably deserves to be in the log message proper (e.g. instead of "Inspired-by", say "In his blog at $URL, ... expressed frustration in doing ...; this will solve that issue in such and such way" in the log, and use the standard trailer that designates where the idea came from).

People named by these trailers are the ones that connect us to end users by noticing and relaying their pain points, and by working with us to improve Git. We would want to credit them no less than we do an author of a casual "here is a typofix in a comment" patch.

And everything else above looks "Helped-by" to me. Again, the different phrases try to convey what kind of help in polishing the change was, but if that is worth expressing, it probably belongs to the log message itself (e.g. instead of "Explained-by", say "The above explanation was given by ... in $gmane/1369525" in the log message and use "Helped-by").