This info is used by several consumers of the appdata (gnome software center, flathub,...) to provide extra details to their users. What needs to be added is this: 1. a copyright comment <!-- Copyright [year] [name] --> as second line of the file 2. a release info tag <releases> <release date="[iso-formatted-date]" version="[version]" /> </releases> This info depends on the commit the appinfo is generated for. [year] and [iso-formatted-date] should be based on the commit date. We already extract this info for other uses so it should be easy to reuse. The same goes for [version]. I would use the BUILD_ID we already assemble here. [name] may be a bit harder to do right. I'm tempted to simply put "GnuCash Development Team", though that doesn't really have legal value. The actual copyright holders of the GnuCash project are the real contributors of each line of code which can be extracted with some effort from the github source repositories. Specifying them all would make this unwieldy. So perhaps our license file should clarify this bit to allow us to use GnuCash Development Team as a shorthand.
Can we refer to the AUTHORS file, e.g. <!-- Copyright 2019 Multiple Authors, see included AUTHORS file. -->
That seems reasonable to me, provided we keep this file updated.
We're not so good at adding one-time contributors, even when they provide a substantial amount of code.
I have actually opened the AUTHORS file now. I feel it contains way too much detail. How about reducing it to 1. a header redirecting users looking for support to the appropriate channels 2. a list of current core devs 3. a list of all contributors that have ever contributed something 1. is a static section that only changes if we change are support channels 2. also rarely changes, probably only when we add or remove write access for someone to code.gnucash.org's repo. 3. can be easily generated using git shortlog --summary --numbered The only caveat I see is that before we migrated to git the original authors were not always properly recorded. So perhaps a one-time effort should be spent comparing the current list of contributors found in AUTHORS with the list returned by the git command above and keep an additional (and immutable) section in the AUTHORS file mentioning those that are not coming out of the git command.
I don't feel strongly about it either way. OTOH I think that maybe you're overthinking this a bit: This is just to create a one-line copyright notice in flatpack distros and I guess in some Gnome software directory. In the extremely unlikely event of an actual copyright lawsuit we'd have to jump through all of these hoops and more, but otherwise it's not that important.
Will be in gnucash 3.7
That is, the changes to the appdata file are. I'll leave the AUTHORS file for what it is now. I agree it may be more effort than it's worth.
