Re: Promoting Git developers

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

> 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").