[gmx-developers] updating GROMACS contributor lists

[Mark Abraham]

Hi,

I strongly support the webpage approach. That's a much better place for
people to get credit, and to link to.

https://clig.dev/#foreword is unfortunately silent on these topics, except
for the general advice to keep signal-to-noise high. For a user, license,
authors, and copyrights are noise almost all the time. We are writing
software for users to feel good about using. Contributors efforts need to
be acknowledged also, but consuming power to write out almost-never-read
author lists billions of times per year, and save them in slurm.out files
is not exactly environmentally friendly.

I think we should not get too attached to the practice we adopted many
years ago. Back then, AUTHORS and COPYING files were not a convention, nor
was it easy to make and maintain a website. We should keep doing the old
thing if it is valuable to users.

Mark

On Wed, 15 Dec 2021 at 10:17, Erik Lindahl <erik.lindahl at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm normally the one most pushing for the importance of sharing credit,
> but the problem is that as the information & author-list have grown we're
> writing so much information that the "printing" rather means the names will
> fly by in a terminal window and immediately be hidden within 0.05s again -
> few if any normal users are going to read a screen full of information just
> because we write them many times.
>
> However, I think I have a better solution :-)
>
> Already a long time ago I had the idea that we should create a page to
> feature developers (old & new ones) on a web page with a picture, short
> description of their background/expertise, and what they are working on
> (both in Gromacs and outside). Then we could also feature a random
> developer on the first page of a better-looking www.gromacs.org every
> time you load the website.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Erik
>
> On Wed, Dec 15, 2021 at 10:10 AM Joe Jordan <e.jjordan12 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I made this comment on the MR, but I will make it here because I think it
>> is important.
>>
>> Perhaps it is just me being selfish, but I would like it if the current
>> developers would still be printed with every invocation of the gmx binary,
>> unless the -q flag is given. I think it is important that people who
>> contribute get some actual visibility instead of just having a name in a
>> file somewhere that no one reads.
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 15, 2021 at 12:32 AM Mark Abraham <mark.j.abraham at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Thanks to those who've gotten in touch - I've updated the names
>>> accordingly.
>>>
>>> Meanwhile, the proposal surfaced that we should also make the tools less
>>> talkative and follow the conventional pattern of using an AUTHORS file
>>> fully, so https://gitlab.com/gromacs/gromacs/-/merge_requests/2327 may
>>> supersede the above linked MR. Do let your thoughts be known!
>>>
>>> I also used ASCII characters to spell people's names correctly where
>>> possible. Do let me know if I missed anything I can do (sorry Vedran, I
>>> couldn't do your surname properly!)
>>>
>>> Mark
>>>
>>> On Mon, 13 Dec 2021 at 14:18, Mark Abraham <mark.j.abraham at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> We want people's efforts to be visible, so we need to update the lists
>>>> of who has contributed to the GROMACS project. The contributor list is now
>>>> getting quite long (great!) so we think it's a good idea to split it into
>>>> those who've been active in the last year or so.
>>>>
>>>> It's fairly easy to see who's made code contributions to the main repo,
>>>> but there are many other kinds of contributions useful to GROMACS users
>>>> that we want to recognize also. For example, docs, testing, tutorials,
>>>> forum participation, workshop organization. Please check out the MR below
>>>> and if you see a name missing or in the wrong place, please get in touch!
>>>>
>>>> https://gitlab.com/gromacs/gromacs/-/merge_requests/2308
>>>>
>>>> Mark
>>>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Erik Lindahl <erik.lindahl at dbb.su.se>
> Professor of Biophysics, Dept. Biochemistry & Biophysics, Stockholm
> University
> Science for Life Laboratory, Box 1031, 17121 Solna, Sweden
>
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