Guy Harris wrote:
On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 02:44:39AM +0200, Ulf Lamping wrote:
1. no short list of authors available.
There's no such thing as a "short" list of authors, there's only
"shorter" lists. :-)
% egrep 'AT' AUTHORS | wc -l
410
*Maybe* if we list only the "major" contributors rather than people
contributing only minor patches, it'll be small enough, although some of
the people who've contributed only minor patches aren't in the "others"
list at the end of AUTHORS.
Konqueror (the KDE Web browser) has a list of 25 authors in its About
dialog in KDE 3.0 - I suspect there are more than those 25 people who
have contributed patches. Our list might be larger even if we include
only the "major" contributors (new dissectors, major new capabilities
for existing dissectors, significant UI or capture-file format or...
enhancements), given that a lot of people have contributed dissectors.
I didn't had in mind to split between major and minor contributors, just
wanted to have a list similar to the one in doc/ethereal.pod.
I don't mind if the list contains over 400 contributors :-), so the list
converted by Joerg's perl script does the job I had in mind.
Currently we have two list of authors, the AUTHORS file (which is a bit
verbose, containing detailed info of the task done, too long for this
purpose)
For what it's worth, the "Authors" tab in the Konqueror "About" dialog
does have one-line descriptions of each of the authors' contributions.
I would think the solution described above will working fine.
2. the AUTHORS file contains non utf8 characters (e.g. line 597: Kent
Engström), which confuses the gtk output functions
Might have to apply some "utf8" filter into the output function.
That raises another issue - most of the entries I've put in AUTHORS use
ISO 8859/1 for accented letters, although in at least one case I
de-accented the letters because I was doing the checkin on OS X and had
Terminal configured to use UTF-8 rather than ISO 8859/1, and assumed
that others might not be reading AUTHORS with something expecting
8859/1, either.
What do you think, converting the AUTHORS file to utf8 then? When output
by Ethereal this will make life much easier,
and people looking at the file with their favourite text editor will
know how to handle it.
Beside that, there seem's to be only a few places really differing.
In the best of all possible worlds, all non-ASCII text on UNIX might be
UTF-8, but, for better or worse, we don't yet live in that world - and,
on Windows, I have the impression that most text-handling software
expects either
1) ASCII or perhaps ASCII extended with some Windows code page
or
2) double-byte Unicode
which aren't UTF-8, either.
We don't have to think about people on windows systems regarding that
topic IMHO.
Most people will never see this file (except from the about dialog
maybe), and those people really looking into this file might know what
to do with it.
(If only the folks devising character sets in the mid-to-late '60's had
been thinking ahead and decided to go with a multi-byte universal
character set. :-) Then again, if only the folks devising date formats
in the '50's, '60's, and 70's had been thinking ahead and all decided to
go with a format that supported 4-digit year numbers....)
Well, I can remember times with 7-bit ASCII, no äöü (and such) for
german people like me at all :-)
Regards, ULFL
