== Rails Contributors

Rails has had lots of contributors. This web application keeps an up to date
list of them and their contributions.

That list is not easy to build. Rails used Subversion until April 2008, and
commits in Subversion do not distinguish author from committer. To give due
credit to contributors some identifier was usually put in square brackets at the
end of the commit message, or in the Changelog.

That was a convention followed by hand. As a consequence over the time a given
contributor often appears under different names, handlers, emails, there are
typos, etc.

I wanted to present a good enough figure for the number of Rails contributors in
my keynote at Conferencia Rails 2008 and started an effort in the core list to
identify these equivalences:

   http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core/browse_thread/thread/7554c8c5a25b4765

Lots and lots of people provided mappings, it was really awesome. Still today I
get some new equivalence now and then. I wrote a script that took that mapping
into account and the figure converged to 1300 people. The list has been
regularly maintained and published in this gist:

   http://gist.github.com/20721

Even nowadays with Git some commits have more than one author.