[Scummvm-devel] CREDITS cleanup

[James 'Ender' Brown]

> 1) We have a section "Contributors" but it's totally unclear who gets 
> there and who not. In particular, it seems that at a time everybody 
> contributing something got added there; but then it stopped.

Well, the Contributors section WAS better maintained at once point. The
idea was for anybody doing submitting bugfix or feature patches that
made a significant improvement in a games playability - or the usability
of ScummVM itself - to be acknowledged.

> . E.g. there 
> is somebody there listed with this comment: "Numerous readability and 
> bugfix patches". OTOH we have had tons of patches which added 
> functionality and fixed serious problems, and their authors were *not* 
> added to the credits list.

Janssen? Well, in reality I can't really remember any significant bugfix
patch from him... and IIRC those readability patches were just replacing
magic numbers with defined constants/enums. He's probably more in there
because of his level of involvement in the earlier days, not for any
significant code contribution.

> Potential solutions: Either we go through all old patches (at least the 
> patch tracker) and add the missing people to the credits (possibly w/o 
> an explanation as to why there were added; just a looong list of the 
> contributors); or we remove some of the more questionable entries.

It's not hard to verify anything questionable. If it was an OLD entry,
check the -devel archives. Anything more recent is probably in the patch
tracker. And a quick browse around the relevant bit of scummvm-old (w/
attic contents of course) will usually show it up.

> 2) In the "ScummVM team" list, we have Peter Moraliyski, Lionel Ulmer 
> and Jeremy Newman, but with all due respect, it appears to me that none 
> of them is active anymore nor has been for at least a year (please 
> speak up and correct me if i am wrong here). So while I do appreciate 
> their contributions in the past, shouldn't they be moved to the 
> "Retired" list?

Yep.

> 3) Jeremy Newman isn't the webmaster (and hasn't been as long as I can 
> recall), but he did design the current website design, for which he 
> should be credited correctly

Move him to the Retired list as former webmaster. He was the webmaster
for a while there, but not very long. When the new site is up, stick
'Former Webmaster / V2 Site Designer'. 

I wanted to try and get the new site up to coincide with 0.7.0, but if
Draven wins  - as it is looking now - that might not be possible since
his is the only entry there that was Design-only and doesn't include a
XHTML/CSS template :(

> As somewhat related side remark: I consider moving the credits out of 
> the README into a CREDITS or AUTHORS file, like other projects do. 

Good idea. 
 

 - Ender