About the AUTHORS file

[jorgepiloto]

One of the special files that GitHub allows to place in a repository is the AUTHORS file. Its content is usually written in Markdown and contains references to the legal authors of the project.

So far, we have been using the following metadata in our Python project files:

authors = [
    {name = "ANSYS, Inc.", email = "[email protected]"},
]
maintainers = [
    {name = "PyAnsys developers", email = "[email protected]"},
]

Hence, the only author is always ANSYS, Inc. whereas the usual contributors are the maintainers of the project.

This got me thinking if we should have two separate files, one for AUTHORS and another one for CONTRIBUTORS or MAINTAINERS. Many softwares out there assume that authors and maintainers are the same but I bet there are differences.

What other projects are doing

From the GNU project guidelines:

Only the contributions that are legally significant for copyright purposes (see Legally Significant) need to be listed. Small contributions, bug reports, ideas, etc., can be omitted.

For the case of Google, a single file named "AUTHORS" is used. If we agree on having a single file, then ANSYS, Inc. should be always placed at the top of this file, same as what Google is doing.

[RobPasMue]

I think the point brought up by @phxnsharp in #248 is really interesting. Contributors come and go. Even the main maintainers of a project. IMO each project should have a maintainers team. And that team should be the author of the package (together with ANSYS, Inc.). This provides a better maintainability, since you can easily add/remove people from the group without having to modify the reference (i.e. the AUTHORS file).