List and recognize ClassicPress contributors about classicpress

[Mte90]

I know that in GitHub is possible to reset the list of contributors from a specific date.
Contacting the support they can do that so we will have a reset point but for the future when we merge commits this will be a little problem.

[nylen]

We'll need to build something to recognize "Props" lines in commit messages. For example, from 36152b6:

Props @Pross.

[pattonwebz]

History squashing to clear out props to past WP contributors may be possible on the repos history but I would encourage you NOT to do that.

While those people are not contributors to classicpress right now they still were in the past (albeit via CP forking their work) and as such they still deserve props and recognition. Also I believe morally it is much preferable to retain original credits (and indeed a requirement of the GPL freedoms that we both are granted and must offer).

[nylen]

History squashing to clear out props to past WP contributors may be possible on the repos history but I would encourage you NOT to do that.

Agreed, we are definitely not going to rewrite the commit history.

I think the discussion above refers to asking GitHub to only count contributions in the graphs starting after our fork point, which they can do, but I'm not convinced this is necessary or valuable either.

Edit: Also, generally when we merge changes from WP, this is usually not at the direct request of the original author, even though their authorship information is still present in our merged change. I have been thinking that we would not count these contributions as intentional contributions to ClassicPress by default, but we do still preserve attribution so that we can recognize them as appropriate.

[nylen]

As a specific example of something we need to be able to do here, ideally in a (semi-)automated fashion:

#419 was written by @bahiirwa , and he used code (patches) by https://profiles.wordpress.org/redsweater/ (Daniel Jalkut (Red Sweater)) in the PR. These patches are originally from https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/45322.

We didn't think to record Daniel as the original author of the patch in the commit history, but we should definitely make note of this somehow.

I think a good solution would be a script that generates/updates a contributors list based on our commit history, and maybe we'd just manually edit the list for special situations like this.

cc @danielj