Thanking every contributor

I am of the opinion that every contributor to a free software project should be thanked. No matter how prolific or sporadic. There are many ways to do it — having a section in the release notes is one common example, the AUTHORS file is another, or if it is a program with a graphical user interface of its own then the about dialog is a very good option. In fact, the about dialog is the best option because it is more persistent than the release notes (ie. does not change from one release to another), and is shinier than a plain AUTHORS file. Not to mention the fact that it is much more visible.

However, it is a pain. While there are scripts lying around to generate the credits for the release notes, I have not seen the same for the about dialog. No doubt it is outdated in every application, which is a shame.

We can do better. For Photos, I decided to generate the list from Git. First I generate an AUTHORS file, and then use it to create a pair of C header and source files which contain the array of strings that can be fed to gtk_about_dialog_set_authors. From now on every new contributor will see her name show up in the about dialog immediately after making her first commit.

It would be nice if this caught on and other application maintainers decided to do something similar.