Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Jean Louis]

Hello,

GNU Emacs is software authored by quite a number of people.

Please include the list of authors and contributors on the GNU Emacs
website: https://www.gnu.org/s/emacs/

The link to "Authors" shall be prominent from the first page.

Jean

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Eli Zaretskii]

On October 28, 2019 9:29:38 AM GMT+02:00, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> GNU Emacs is software authored by quite a number of people.
> 
> Please include the list of authors and contributors on the GNU Emacs
> website: https://www.gnu.org/s/emacs/
> 
> The link to "Authors" shall be prominent from the first page.
> 
> Jean

Thanks for the proposal.

As you mentioned, the list of contributors to Emacs is very long and changes very frequently.  For that reason, we include the condensed list, produced by a script, in the distribution (see etc/AUTHORS) and also have the Acqnowledgments section in the Emacs user manual, and update them only when a release is being produced.

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Jean Louis]

That sure. And that is not the website.

Emacs is not a product of a company that tries to hide authors.

Website is not git and not Emacs package with file AUTHORS. Website is presentation to the world including those people who do not use Emacs.

Including those who write about Emacs while not using it. It is main source of information about Emacs.

Crediting people on the website shall be prominent.

It is not for me. I can see contributors in the git.


On October 28, 2019 8:49:12 AM UTC, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>On October 28, 2019 9:29:38 AM GMT+02:00, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
>wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> GNU Emacs is software authored by quite a number of people.
>> 
>> Please include the list of authors and contributors on the GNU Emacs
>> website: https://www.gnu.org/s/emacs/
>> 
>> The link to "Authors" shall be prominent from the first page.
>> 
>> Jean
>
>Thanks for the proposal.
>
>As you mentioned, the list of contributors to Emacs is very long and
>changes very frequently.  For that reason, we include the condensed
>list, produced by a script, in the distribution (see etc/AUTHORS) and
>also have the Acqnowledgments section in the Emacs user manual, and
>update them only when a release is being produced.

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Eli Zaretskii]

On October 28, 2019 11:12:08 AM GMT+02:00, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> wrote:
> That sure. And that is not the website.
> 
> Emacs is not a product of a company that tries to hide authors.
> 
> Website is not git and not Emacs package with file AUTHORS. Website is
> presentation to the world including those people who do not use Emacs.
> 
> Including those who write about Emacs while not using it. It is main
> source of information about Emacs.
> 
> Crediting people on the website shall be prominent.
> 
> It is not for me. I can see contributors in the git.


I don't think there's any argument about the general usefulness of having this information there.

Do you have a practical proposal for how to include this information on the site?
Does anyone else have practical proposals?

TIA

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Jean Louis]

* Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> [2019-10-28 15:54]:
> On October 28, 2019 11:12:08 AM GMT+02:00, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> wrote:
> > That sure. And that is not the website.
> > 
> > Emacs is not a product of a company that tries to hide authors.
> > 
> > Website is not git and not Emacs package with file AUTHORS. Website is
> > presentation to the world including those people who do not use Emacs.
> > 
> > Including those who write about Emacs while not using it. It is main
> > source of information about Emacs.
> > 
> > Crediting people on the website shall be prominent.
> > 
> > It is not for me. I can see contributors in the git.
> 
> 
> I don't think there's any argument about the general usefulness of
> having this information there.

I am sorry, I was under impression that giving credit to authors is so
common. Now I see you see no argument about general
usefulness. Website's usefulness is information. Not only distribution
of software.

Whole website is written to promote GNU Emacs, it is beautiful, d
shows its features, video episodes, and similar. Thus one of features
is that 1800+ people contributed to GNU Emacs. That is important
feature.

Giving proper attribution on a website is useful and beneficial, it is
"thank you" to authors.

That AUTHORS file is located in etc/AUTHORIS is fine and good.

> Do you have a practical proposal for how to include this information
> on the site?

There can be page like "Authors" or "History" where it can be written
what is GNU Emacs, how it started and list of people who contributed.

You have git, there must be some script that can quickly pull out
names of all authors and simply make a page out of it.

For example from:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24807930/git-list-all-authors-of-a-folder-of-files

by using:
git log --pretty=format:"%an%x09" myfolder | sort | uniq

I have got whole list of authors. With some other formatting it can be
done very nicely and easily. They could be mentioned in one line or
anyhow.

In my opinion History of Emacs is not mentioned on website, it should
be, authors are not mentioned, it should be. Website is not for
authors, it is for public, including for media, and people who do not
use Emacs. There is difference if software was made by 1-2 people or
by 1800+ people. General usefulness could be described as
information and giving credits.

Aaron Conole	
Aaron Ecay	
Aaron Jensen	
Aaron S. Hawley	
Achim Gratz	
...cut....
Yuri D'Elia	
Yuri Karaban	
Yuri Khan	
Yuuki Harano	
Yuya Nishihara	
Yves Baumes	
Zachary Kanfer	
Zhongwei Yao	
Йордан Миладинов	
উৎসব রায়	

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/28/19 3:41 AM, Jean Louis wrote:
> You have git, there must be some script

There is no script. Someone could write a script that would do a good 
job of what you're suggesting, and volunteers are welcome to do so.

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Jean Louis]

* Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> [2019-10-29 00:16]:
> On 10/28/19 3:41 AM, Jean Louis wrote:
> > You have git, there must be some script
> 
> There is no script. Someone could write a script that would do a
> good job of what you're suggesting, and volunteers are welcome to do
> so.

There is example I gave you. Maintainer of that website can run that
script, it is few seconds, and create HTML page.

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:28:43 +0530
> From: Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> There is example I gave you. Maintainer of that website can run that
> script, it is few seconds, and create HTML page.

That command produces 1000 names.  Is it reasonable to have them all
on that page?  Will it be helpful?

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Jean Louis]

* Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> [2019-10-29 02:01]:
> > Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:28:43 +0530
> > From: Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
> > Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > 
> > There is example I gave you. Maintainer of that website can run that
> > script, it is few seconds, and create HTML page.
> 
> That command produces 1000 names.  Is it reasonable to have them all
> on that page?  Will it be helpful?

That would be exactly the point.

1000 names for GNU Emacs project gives weight and importance of the
efforts. It can only attract more people to contribute.

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/28/19 11:58 AM, Jean Louis wrote:
>> There is no script. Someone could write a script that would do a
>> good job of what you're suggesting, and volunteers are welcome to do
>> so.
> There is example I gave you.

That example is just part of the problem; it's not enough to generate 
the web page you asked for. For example, the file that the script 
generates for Emacs (once you modify it to work for Emacs), is 
improperly encoded because some of the names are in UTF-8 and some use a 
different (non-ASCII) encoding. There are other glitches like that that 
would need to be addressed. Plus, surely we can do better than a plain 
text file listing one name per line.

Furthermore, having just that script is not enough; there needs to be an 
automated way to generate the updated website. It's not a hard job to 
automate all this, but it is work that someone would need to do (and 
more importantly, test).

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Jean Louis]

* Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> [2019-10-29 02:21]:
> On 10/28/19 11:58 AM, Jean Louis wrote:
> > > There is no script. Someone could write a script that would do a
> > > good job of what you're suggesting, and volunteers are welcome to do
> > > so.
> > There is example I gave you.
> 
> That example is just part of the problem; it's not enough to generate the
> web page you asked for. For example, the file that the script generates for
> Emacs (once you modify it to work for Emacs), is improperly encoded because
> some of the names are in UTF-8 and some use a different (non-ASCII)
> encoding.

You mean some other encoding but not the UTF-8? But I could run it in
Emacs and edit the list without problems just as UTF-8. Which name
exactly? 

> There are other glitches like that that would need to be
> addressed. Plus, surely we can do better than a plain text file
> listing one name per line.
> 
> Furthermore, having just that script is not enough; there needs to be an
> automated way to generate the updated website. It's not a hard job to
> automate all this, but it is work that someone would need to do (and more
> importantly, test).

I do not have a clue how Emacs website is maintained.

I know how are my pages maintained, so I have templates and inside of
templates I can even run scripts, or Emacs functions, and such make
the output and it is inserted into the page, and later often
formatted by markdown to HTML.

When static page generator starts generating, script is run and I
don't need to take care of it.

For me that would be matter of few minutes to generate list of
authors, with some "," (commas) in between or similar.

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/28/19 2:09 PM, Jean Louis wrote:

> I could run it in
> Emacs and edit the list without problems just as UTF-8.

That would work if this job were just a one-off. But the list of 
contributors changes with time and we don't want to do this task by hand 
each time the set of contributors changes.

> Which name exactly?

Sorry, I've forgotten. But you can run the command yourself and see. As 
I recall, more than one name has problems, and the problems are not 
limited to non-UTF-8 names.

> I do not have a clue how Emacs website is maintained.

https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Web-Pages.html

should help you get started.

> When static page generator starts generating, script is run and I
> don't need to take care of it.

It's not that simple at Savannah, for various reasons.

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[VanL]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> Plus, surely we can do better than a
> plain text file listing one name per line.

The OpenBSD 6.6 artwork is awesome. Perhaps,
the names can be revealed in an SVG artwork.

-- 
© 2019 VanL
gpg using EEF2 37E9 3840 0D5D 9183  251E 9830 384E 9683 B835
          'If the bug bites,don't fight it.' - Nancy S. Steinhardt

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 11:45:31 -0700
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> On 10/28/19 3:41 AM, Jean Louis wrote:
> > You have git, there must be some script
> 
> There is no script. Someone could write a script that would do a good 
> job of what you're suggesting, and volunteers are welcome to do so.

There's admin/authors.el, which produces etc/AUTHORS.  But that's not
exactly what Jean Louis had in mind, I think.

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Jean Louis]

* Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> [2019-10-29 01:36]:
> > From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> > Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 11:45:31 -0700
> > Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > 
> > On 10/28/19 3:41 AM, Jean Louis wrote:
> > > You have git, there must be some script
> > 
> > There is no script. Someone could write a script that would do a good 
> > job of what you're suggesting, and volunteers are welcome to do so.
> 
> There's admin/authors.el, which produces etc/AUTHORS.  But that's not
> exactly what Jean Louis had in mind, I think.

It is about website: https://www.gnu.org/s/emacs and listing authors
and history on the website. Website speaks to the world, including
non-Emacs users and media.

Re: Proposal: include list of contributors on GNU Emacs website

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

Remember, the people who work on Emacs are all volunteers.
They work part-time and have other things to do.
They have to focus on what they consider most important.

I think that publishing the list of contributors in the release
and the repository is good enough.  Isn't there a URL for that file
in the repository?  If so, we could make a link to that
from the main Emacs web page.

If you think the list of contributors should be updated more frequently,
would you like to work on that?


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)