6.13 The THANKS File

There is no parallel node in GNU Standards.

In Emacs, thanks are not published for the people who just send bug fixes. There are too many of them. The only people thanked are those who do larger amounts of work. However, if you find it is OK to thank them all, that is OK (letter from Richard, 1995-09-20).

All distributions should contain a THANKS file, starting with a wording similar to this one:

GNU package THANKS file

GNU package has originally been written by original author. Many people further contributed to GNU package by reporting problems, suggesting various improvements or submitting actual code. Here is a list of these people. Help me keep it complete and exempt of errors.

followed by a two column lists of contributors, one per line, alphabetically sorted. The left column gives the contributor's name, while the right column gives the last known good electronic address for this contributor.

You can also decide to send some kind of special greeting¹ when you initially add a name to your THANKS file. The mere presence of a name in THANKS is then a flag to you that the initial greeting has been sent.

Another good habit is to never put an electronic address in ChangeLog, only in THANKS. So, when someone requests that his email address be updated, this only has to be done in one place. ChangeLog always quotes the full name² of all contributors for each change, introduced by the expression `From' or `Reported by'. Those two files combined are very useful when you need to revise an area you do not know well, but which some users do. You can then construct special purpose mailing lists of provably interested people, for solving together some specific problems. This has been useful more than once.