Bug 137546 – Add Babak to contributors.json and add historical email addresses for some contributors

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: FIXED
• Component: Tools / Tests

[Ryosuke Niwa]

contributors.json is used to analyze historical commit data and commit logs.
Add back historical email addresses for some contributors and also add Babak (Shafiei).

[Ryosuke Niwa]

Created attachment 239511 [details]
Patch

[WebKit Commit Bot]

Attachment 239511 [details] did not pass style-queue:


ERROR: Tools/Scripts/webkitpy/common/config/contributors.json:0:  contributors.json should not be modified through the commit queue  [json/syntax] [5]
Total errors found: 1 in 2 files


If any of these errors are false positives, please file a bug against check-webkit-style.

[Chris Dumez]

Comment on attachment 239511 [details]
Patch

r=me

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

> contributors.json is used to analyze historical commit data and commit logs.

And here am I hoping to remove all inactive contributors from this file, to make Bugzilla autocomplete work better...

[Ryosuke Niwa]

(In reply to comment #4)
> > contributors.json is used to analyze historical commit data and commit logs.
> 
> And here am I hoping to remove all inactive contributors from this file, to make Bugzilla autocomplete work better...

We can add some flag to indicate they're inactive instead.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Is analyzing historical data important enough to clutter this file? It seems like maintaining history is secondary to keeping the project going, so whoever is interested in that should just maintain their own, outside of webkit.org. We actively delete old unused code, so why keep old unused e-mails?

[Ryosuke Niwa]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Is analyzing historical data important enough to clutter this file? It seems like maintaining history is secondary to keeping the project going, so whoever is interested in that should just maintain their own, outside of webkit.org. We actively delete old unused code, so why keep old unused e-mails?

Yes, it's important. Contributors.json is like a file based database, it's not intended to be read by humans directly.  For that, we have team.html and a command tool like webkit-patch find-users or webkitbot's whois command.

[Ryosuke Niwa]

Let me put this way.  If a new contributor comes to #webkit and asks webkitbot who ojan is because he saw his name on a change log, then webkitbot should still be able to tell who that is even though Ojan will be considered as an inactive reviewer per recent discussion.

I agree we should hide inactive contributors to commit queue, watch list, Bugzilla auto completion, etc... but that doesn't require us to remove inactive contributors or emails from contributors.json.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

I don't think that I agree with that, using webkitbot to find a user seems like such a rare occurrence that maybe we should just remove the functionality outright, not optimize for it.

Keeping old affiliations and inactive e-mails also seems more harmful than useful, just like keeping stale ifdefed-out code.

But it's not a huge deal either way.

[Brian Burg]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Let me put this way.  If a new contributor comes to #webkit and asks webkitbot who ojan is because he saw his name on a change log, then webkitbot should still be able to tell who that is even though Ojan will be considered as an inactive reviewer per recent discussion.

How will they know to ask webkitbot? Why would they ask webkitbot if Ojan's email is in the ChangeLog?

I don't think using contributors.json is a good basis for analyzing historical commit data. There are many contributors inside Apple and outside who are not in that file.

A serious software repository mining tool will have to deal with other issues anyway, such as contributors.json names not matching up with the name stored by git config. I am not convinced that keeping old entries in TOT will help much since repository mining will have to piece together metadata from old commits anyway.

[Ryosuke Niwa]

Committed r174538: <http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/174538>