Automatically suggesting potential authors

[agitter]

Because the manuscript git repository has access to the commit history, it could automatically suggest a list of manuscript authors. Adding authors to the official list in the metadata should be done manually because it requires author approval and information that is not available through the commits. However, Manubot could populate a list of contributors to the text.

One idea would be to have an optional flag or environment variable to opt-in to this. It could generate an acknowledgements-like section that lists contributors who are not already listed as authors. Future versions could potentially even display information about the number of commits and scope of the edits.

There would be some details to manage. One is that all the rootstock commits are also in a manuscript's commit history. We would likely want to filter those contributors or at least list them separately. In addition, individual contributors sometimes make contributions with multiple names or email addresses, which makes them appear as multiple contributors in the commit history.

Thanks @ejfertig for the suggestion.