Recognize past maintainers and contributors

[brainwane]

Right now, the only way for the community as a whole to easily see who maintains twine is to look at pypi.org/project/twine/ and see who has owner/maintainer privileges. We're currently removing inactive people from that list, partly because of the principle of least privilege. However:

I agree, there's no real reason to add anyone as a Maintainer [on PyPI] (with only the ability to upload new releases) aside from the fact that it's one of the few bits of recognition we can give to maintainers in exchange for their volunteer work.

Originally posted by @di in #647 (comment)

Therefore I suggest we create a section within the AUTHORS file, or within the developer documentation, to recognize and list past and present maintainers.

[bhrutledge]

Ah, I (possibly prematurely) removed AUTHORS in #643 (9192f71), since it seemed unmaintained, and GitHub seems to keep track of this.

I'm still 👍 for recognizing past maintainers and contributors in general (though I don't know if there's a threshold).

@brainwane Do you know of any PyPA projects that do this well, either in AUTHORS or other documentation?

One approach I've seen is https://github.com/all-contributors/all-contributors.

[sigmavirus24]

A text-based list is better than software that can embed tracking information. I was shocked that we removed AUTHORS but I came to it late. There's a lot more that can be included in AUTHORS than just code contributions and a lot more can be recognized there. Maybe it shouldn't be called "AUTHORS" but the idea is to provide recognition. People can contribute on StackOverflow by answering questions or by commenting on issues and helping debug things without ever sending a pull request or commits

[brainwane]

We haven't removed AUTHORS yet! @bhrutledge perhaps you could revert that change within #643 which has not been merged yet? I'll leave that in a review there as well.

[di]

I have not reviewed #643 yet but I agree it should not remove AUTHORS.

[bhrutledge]

I restored AUTHORS to #643; clearly I chose to ask forgiveness instead of permission. 😉

I'd still love to see examples of projects that do this well, in a way that acknowledges contributions while minimizing extra steps for contributors/maintainers.

@sigmavirus24 pointed out urllib3: https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/blob/master/CONTRIBUTORS.txt

[sigmavirus24]

OpenStack also has several ways of acknowledging different types of contributions (translators, doc writes, code contributors, folks who help out on the operators mailing list, etc.) I haven't gone looking for it again though

[sigmavirus24]

I'd still love to see examples of projects that do this well, in a way that acknowledges contributions while minimizing extra steps for contributors/maintainers.

Also, the point as I understood it was to acknowledge all contributions. The "while minimizing extra steps for contributors/maintainers" was not something I was taking as a requirement. It's up to the contributor if they'd like to claim their recognition for whatever change they made. Some folks genuinely don't feel like adding themselves to an AUTHORS or CONTRIBUTORS file. That's fine too. That doesn't create extra steps for maintainers.

[bhrutledge]

Some folks genuinely don't feel like adding themselves to an AUTHORS or CONTRIBUTORS file. That's fine too.

Agreed, so that could just be a language change. Currently, it's a required step for submitting changes:

4. Ensure that your name is added to the end of the :file:`AUTHORS`
   file using the format ``Name <email@domain.com> (url)``, where the
   ``(url)`` portion is optional.

[sigmavirus24]

We can add (Optional but encouraged) to the start of that line, sure. I didn't recall that being in the docs at all so thanks for pointing that out.