[vtk-developers] thanks field deleted

Prabhu Ramachandran prabhu at aero.iitm.ernet.in
Mon Jan 28 12:30:44 EST 2002


>>>>> "WS" == Will Schroeder <will.schroeder at kitware.com> writes:

    WS> What do other people think? I agree with Ken that a
    WS> centralized list of contributors is a good thing. Is this
    WS> better than putting a thanks field per file? Or doing both?

I think putting the thanks field in both the header and a separate
CREDITS file is a very good idea.  Putting the thanks in the header is
nice for reasons that others have already mentioned.

The credits file is nice because (a) it is one place where everyone is
mentioned (b) it is nice (and usually pretty impressive) to see how
many individuals from different backgrounds have contributed to VTK.
It would be nice if there were also additional information about what
kind of contributions were made in the CREDITS file.  Actually, the
Linux source code credits file is pretty nice to read.  Here are the
first few lines from the kernel 2.2.18:

--------------------------------------------------
        This is at least a partial credits-file of people that have
        contributed to the Linux project.  It is sorted by name and
        formatted to allow easy grepping and beautification by
        scripts.  The fields are: name (N), email (E), web-address
        (W), PGP key ID and fingerprint (P), description (D), and
        snail-mail address (S).
        Thanks,

                        Linus
----------

N: Matti Aarnio
E: mea at nic.funet.fi
D: Alpha systems hacking, IPv6 and other network related stuff
D: One of assisting postmasters for vger.kernel.org's lists
S: (ask for current address)
S: Finland

...
--------------------------------------------------

The entire file is about 2500 lines long!  Maybe we could use
something similar?


prabhu



More information about the vtk-developers mailing list