Currently, Misc/ACKS is organized as a list “in rough alphabetical order by last names”.
IMHO, it is not easy for both humans and programs to sort. And there are already quite some mistakes as it is hard to insert a new one as the list grows or people are just confused.
e.g.
Victor Terrón
Pablo Galindo
Richard M. Tew
...
Gennadiy Zlobin
Doug Zongker
Peter Åstrand
Vlad Emelianov
Andrey Doroschenko
And name duplication is not a rare condition, so can I suggest this format?
family name, given name [email]
email is optional to address name duplication. With this format, a small script can be written to insert a new contributor to ensure the correctness.
Yes, it’s meant to be sorted using human judgment, and can’t be sorted by a program (and isn’t, so no problem here). Not everyone has a first name and a family name, and different languages have different sorting rules.
Some time ago I reordered some stray entries and removed some duplicates.
If that small issue came back, a PR can fix it.
I don’t think we should ditch it for those that predate git and thus attribution from that mechanism, but I do think it’s reasonable to mark it a historical document and not ever update it again.
Late to the party, but agreed—it clearly has historical value, but I personally see any benefit of continued manual updates to that file in this modern era of Git and GitHub as not worth the extra work/friction for new contributors and potential for merge conflicts, etc. A few other projects have such, but I generally don’t add my name unless specifically required to—pretty sure I never added mine here.
Should I propose a PR to update the devguide to reflect this? I see a handful of instances that mention it as a requirement…
getting-started/git-boot-camp.rst:553:items like updating ``Misc/ACKS``.
getting-started/pull-request-lifecycle.rst:265:* Has ``Misc/ACKS`` been updated?
getting-started/pull-request-lifecycle.rst:516:Non-trivial contributions are credited in the ``Misc/ACKS`` file (and, most
triage/triaging.rst:82:* includes the author in ``Misc/ACKS``, either already or the patch adds them
We should probably also briefly mention in the introduction of the ACKS file itself (e.g. below Guido’s message) that the file is historical as of Jan 2023 and needn’t be updated further, and users should refer to the GitHub contributor list (with link) and/or the Git commit history for future attributions? I could also append (historical) to the mention in the Misc/README.md and either remove or supplement the mention in Doc/about.rst with (historical) and a link to the current Contributors list on GitHub.
