bitfluent

Full List of 1,339 Rails Contributors

One of the biggest plus points of using git for open source projects is the preservation of the original author of the patch. Here’s how it looks like when displayed in GitHub:

In the Subversion days, patches into Rails were attributed by adding an arbitrary combination of the author’s name/email/nick at the end of the commit messages. Makes it kind of hard to keep track of the number of distinct contributors over the lifetime of the project.

Fortunately, Xavier Noria whipped up a script to parse the legacy commit messages to extract the number of commits per author using these rules:

1. First extract authors from commit message
2. If empty, check changelogs via git show id
3. If empty, author is the committer

The full list is can be found on the Rails Contributors page.