RFC: Grant acknowledgement

[Volker Braun]

Since my review request for the urgent bugfix for this:

    sage: RLF(0) < oo

    False

has been hijacked by an open-ended discussion about and whether grants ought to be acknowledged in the source tree, I'd like to break out that discussion into a separate thread.

Questions:

* Should sources contain acknowledgements at all

* If a Sage release gets a DOI, are we required by some funding agency to acknowledge grants in it?

* Do the people writing the rules at the funding agency have a policy? a clue?

My proposal:

Create a top-level Acknowledgements.txt file, and put them in there if you must.

  

[William Stein]

+1 to this as long as we can autogenerate the website ack page from this.

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[mmarco]

I definitely am against the acknowledgements in the source code. It could be necessary to have some way of acknowledgement (at the end, we would like the community to consider that writing code for sage is not a minor task compared to publishing papers), but that should be somewhere else. I proposed either a comment in the trac ticket or the commit message, but the file with the acknowledgements is better. But one thing that is important from my point of view is to keep clear which code was funded by which grant (i.e., specify the commits in the acknowledgement). 

[luisfe]

I agree with the rest of the opinions, a top-level Acknowledgement.txt is OK for but the sources should not contain acknowledgements. Most of the contributions to Sage do not have an "author" filled in the sources. If you want to look who did that and when you search in the revision history. So the Ack could also be there.