Take co-authoring contributions into consideration

[seisman]

Continue discussions in #3730 (comment).

Currently, we use the git shortlog -sne command to count author contributions. Below is a trimmed output on 2025/01/05:

  1054  Dongdong Tian <[email protected]>
   278  Yvonne Fröhlich <[email protected]>
   266  dependabot[bot] <49699333+dependabot[bot]@users.noreply.github.com>
   261  Wei Ji <[email protected]>
   256  Leonardo Uieda <[email protected]>
   192  Will Schlitzer <[email protected]>
   130  Michael Grund <[email protected]>
    68  Meghan Jones <[email protected]>
    33  Yao Jiayuan <[email protected]>
    30  Meghan Jones <[email protected]>
    16  Michael Grund <[email protected]>
    15  Liam Toney <[email protected]>

The GitHub contributors page (https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/graphs/contributors) shows totally different numbers of commits, likely because GitHub also considers co-authorship. I feel these numbers (including the number of additions and deletions) make more sense.

To consider co-authorship, we can use the following command:

git shortlog -sne --group=author --group=trailer:co-authored-by

The output is:

  1396  Dongdong Tian <[email protected]>
   603  Wei Ji <[email protected]>
   398  Yvonne Fröhlich <[email protected]>
   266  dependabot[bot] <49699333+dependabot[bot]@users.noreply.github.com>
   258  Leonardo Uieda <[email protected]>
   256  Michael Grund <[email protected]>
   237  Will Schlitzer <[email protected]>
   129  Meghan Jones <[email protected]>
    53  Yao Jiayuan <[email protected]>
    45  Meghan Jones <[email protected]>
    22  Michael Grund <[email protected]>
    16  actions-bot <[email protected]>
    15  Liam Toney <[email protected]>
    14  Max Jones <[email protected]>
     8  Meghan Jones <[email protected]>
     7  Max Jones <[email protected]>
     7  Wei Ji <[email protected]>
     7  yohaimagen <[email protected]>
     5  Tong <[email protected]>
     4  TIAN Dongdong <[email protected]>
     4  Yvonne Fröhlich <[email protected]>
     3  Andre L. Belem <[email protected]>
     3  Dongdong Tian <[email protected]>

After merging the commits from the same author but with different git commit author names or emails, the numbers are the same as those of GitHub.

Currently, we count the contributions (using git shortlog -sne) in the following places (xref: https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/blob/main/AUTHORSHIP.md):

• Changelog for each release
• Authorship on Zenodo archives of releases
• Scientific publications (papers)

I think in all these cases, the co-authorship contributions should be considered.

[yvonnefroehlich]

Thanks, @seisman, for writing up this issue!

I remember I recognized the difference between git shortlog -sne and the GitHub numbers already some time ago, but could not find the related comment (#2651 (comment)) directly.

I agree on considering co-authorship as it is fair to acknowledge any kind of review (bringing up or participation in discussions, providing ideas, but also guidance during working on more complicated tasks / learning to work on new tasks). The number of additions and deletions may partly help to consider the different work loads of PRs.

However, I am unsure, if it is possible to change the rules for the author order now, and if we have to contact and ask all (at least the affected) authors for their opinions or being OK with this?

In case we keep git shortlog -sne, I still would allow for some adjustments, e.g. @weiji14 is definitely before my in the author list!