Behaviour of lint check files_unchanged is different in 3.1.2

[awgymer]

Description of the bug

In previous versions of the tools manifest.author was required for the files_unchanged check and this was checked up front and if it wasn't present the test was skipped (source code).

In 3.1.2 we now pull names from either manifest.author or manifest.contributors (source code). However neither of these are checked for up front now (source code).

This can cause an unhandled error to be raised if neither manifest.author or manifest.contributors is present or if they resolve to an empty string (e.g. if contributors do not have a name field set see: pairgenomealign example).

We should either check for the presence of the author/contributors up front or add a check at the point of determination of names to similarly ignore the lint test.

Command used and terminal output

System information

No response