Karl Berry <[email protected]> writes: > I'm wondering if it's useful these days to keep email addresses in the > THANKS files. Besides being another source for spam harvesters, my guess > is that many of the addresses are stale. Hence when I need some past > contributor's email address, I don't bother looking in THANKS, I look in > the ChangeLog and/or mail archives and/or search online.
My impression is that even maintaining an accurate list of contributors to thank in a THANKS file is not particular useful any more. The git log is a more accurate source of who did what (and consequently should be thanked), possibly followed by ChangeLog in the (increasingly rare) cases where those aren't generated from the git log. I would prefer to use the THANKS files for acknowledging contributions from people or organizations who helped in some other way (e.g., hosting, websites, things that inspired the project) that wouldn't be clear from the git log. Even the AUTHORS file is becoming a bit less useful than it was. The authorship should also follow from the git log. Perhaps the more useful thing to record is current MAINTAINER (aka code owner) of particular source files and/or the entire project, which is often different from the initial set of authors. So I find e-mail addresses in any these files just another thing that gets outdated quickly. But going through these files cleaning them up is a lot of tedious work. /Simon
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