Re: thoughts on v18 RMT

As for the acknowledgements, I took this over knowing it was a fairly informal process that could use some automation, but ultimately still needed manual review. At the time, it seemed obvious that the list of credits was initially quite simple and small, but had grown beyond the existing process, so something was needed to automate as much as possible, and if possible reduce the workload for whatever manual review remained.

I've created some scripts that try to capture as many attributions and mentions as possible, first by consulting lists of known past contributors and then by common regex patterns. But it also "redacts" that same information from the git log output, making it easier to manually review, as the viewer need only concern themselves with the text that hasn't already generated names or known non-names. This was a process that required many refinements over many iterations, and more refinements are yet to come.

The biggest outputs of all this work are the growing list of name+email pairs of known past contributors, plus the preferred spellings of those names. Searching for known names/emails is far less error prone than regexes, obviously, so that will automatically get better future iterations, and will in turn reduce the amount of manual review that will always need to be done, reducing that process to handling names we haven't previously encountered before.