Automatically generate AUTHORS.txt file from git history

[catamorphism]

We should automatically generate AUTHORS.txt instead of manually updating it. We would also need an author substitutions file in concert with this, since some commits have non-valid email addresses or names.

Otherwise, especially with bors, it's too easy to forget to add someone (or lose track of who has a committer's agreement on file and who doesn't).

[steveklabnik]

👍. It's so easy to mess this kind of thing up. Rails has a little script that handles mappings in cases where it's not what it should be.

[brson]

I don't think this matters for 1.0

[catamorphism]

Nominating for production-ready (I don't think it's strictly necessary for production ready, but I'd like to have something encouraging us to do this :-)

[emberian]

git log --format='%aN <%aE>' | sort -f | uniq does the job. It respects the mailmap.

[graydon]

just a bug, removing milestone/nomination.

[catamorphism]

@brson I think we should be sure to update the AUTHORS file before 0.8. (Of course we don't have to generate it automatically like this bug suggests.) I'm pretty sure it omits lots of newer contributors.

[brson]

I think we can do this auto-generation for just the dist tarballs - people with access to the git history can use git.

[flaper87]

Triage: I agree with @brson

I'll stab this one