Re: Contributor listing policy

Josh,

> This particular change was discussed and debated publicly and the patch
> submitted by me and approved, months ago. It is also why the
> contributor list is not under developers anymore. It's under community.

Actually, looking at the archives, there wasn't much discussion when you
submitted the patch; I doubt that most people realized the changes it made.
I know that I wasn't clear on it, noticing only the change in sort order, and
certainly the rest of the core team (or hackers) didn't discuss it.

Contributor listings are not a matter of *only* WWW team's discretion. In
fact, traditionally, contents of the developer listings have been determined
by the core team; if we're going to change that and give sole authority to
WWW maintainers, then I think we ought to have an *explicit* discussion about
that.

> > This is a compromise between previous practice (not listing non-code
> > contributors at all) and what some people would like to see ("Major
> > Contributors" with non-code contributors); I figure we'll revisit
> > this policy in a year or so.
>
> The idea that a line of code is more important than the organization of
> an army (users) is incorrect. Without one the other is pointless.

I'm hardly one to argue that non-code contributors aren't important. However,
I also don't see a reason to dramatically change the listings all at once;
why not do it in stages, with non-code contributors listed in the
"contributors" section this year, and under "major" maybe next year? Given
that non-code contributors currently aren't listed *at all* despite the
change in headings, I still see it moving in the right direction.

Futher, I don't feel that I -- as the core team member current preparing the
names for the contributor listings -- have a good handle on the difference
between a "major" and "minor" non-code contributor. *I* would like a year to
feel out some good practices.

The core team felt this was a reasonable compromise; Magnus felt it was a
reasonable compromise. So far, you're the only one to think it's not a
reasonable way to go, so I'd like to hear from some other people as well as
you.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco