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by Andy Lester.
Original Post: How to poop on your project's contributors
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GCC 4.3.4 was released recently. Here's the announcement:
GCC 4.3.4 is a bug-fix release containing fixes for regressions and
serious bugs in GCC 4.3.3. This release is available from the
FTP servers listed at: http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
...
As always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far
too many to thank individually!
"Too many to thank individually?" How many is "too many"? Would the list of GCC contributors have caused multi-megabyte email messages to swamp the mail servers across the Internet?
What this message really says is "I do not want to take the time to thank people individually. Your contributions are not worth a few minutes of my time." What a fantastic way to poop on your contributors. They would have been better off just not mentioning the contributors at all, rather than saying "You're not worth enumerating."
When someone contributes to your project, the least you can do, quite literally, is to include his or her name in a list of credits. Here are the acknowledgements from WWW::Mechanize.
Thanks to the numerous people who have helped out on WWW::Mechanize in one way or another, including Kirrily Robert for the original WWW::Automate, Gisle Aas, Jeremy Ary, Hilary Holz, Rafael Kitover, Norbert Buchmuller, Dave Page, David Sainty, H.Merijn Brand, Matt Lawrence, Michael Schwern, Adriano Ferreira, Miyagawa, Peteris Krumins, Rafael Kitover, David Steinbrunner, Kevin Falcone, Mike O'Regan, Mark Stosberg, Uri Guttman, Peter Scott, Phillipe Bruhat, Ian Langworth, John Beppu, Gavin Estey, Jim Brandt, Ask Bjoern Hansen, Greg Davies, Ed Silva, Mark-Jason Dominus, Autrijus Tang, Mark Fowler, Stuart Children, Max Maischein, Meng Wong, Prakash Kailasa, Abigail, Jan Pazdziora, Dominique Quatravaux, Scott Lanning, Rob Casey, Leland Johnson, Joshua Gatcomb, Julien Beasley, Abe Timmerman, Peter Stevens, Pete Krawczyk, Tad McClellan, and the late great Iain Truskett.
That's everyone who has contributed such that I was able to get their name (e.g. not an anonymous bug in RT).
And whenever I update a change log, which I release as part of release announcements, I put the person's name in there, too, as in this from ack:
Added new switch --column to display the column of the first hit on the row. Thanks to Eric Van Dewoestine.
One of my favorite Miss Manners letters went like this:
Dear Miss Manners, when is a thank you note not required?
Gentle Reader, when no gift is received.
All project coordinators would do well to remember the lesson.
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