For each Practice Exercise, we've looked at the commit history of its files to see which commits touched that Practice Exercise.
Each commit that we could associate with a Practice Exercise was used to determine authorship/contributorship.
### Authors
1. Find the Git commit author of the oldest commit linked to that Practice Exercise
2. Find the GitHub username for the Git commit author of that commit
3. Add the GitHub username of the Git commit author to the `authors` key in the `.meta/config.json` file
### Contributors
1. Find the Git commit authors and any co-authors of all but the oldest commit linked to that Practice Exercise. If there is only one commit, there won't be any contributors.
1. Exclude the Git commit author and any co-authors of the oldest commit from the list of Git commit authors (an author is _not_ also a contributor)
2. Find the GitHub usernames for the Git commit authors and any co-authors of those commits
3. Add the GitHub usernames of the Git commit authors and any co-authors to the `contributor` key in the `.meta/config.json` file
We used the GitHub GraphQL API to find the username of a commit author or any co-authors. In some cases though, a username cannot be found for a commit (e.g. due to the user account no longer existing), in which case the commit was skipped.
## Renames
There are a small number of Practice Exercises that might have been renamed at some point. You can ask Git to "follow" a file over its renames using `git log --follow <file>`, which will also return commits made before renames. Unfortunately, Git does not store renames, it just stores the contents of the renamed files and tries to guess if a file was renamed by looking at its contents. This _can_ (and will) lead to false positives, where Git will think a file has been renamed whereas it hasn't. As we don't want to have incorrect authors/contributors for exercises, we're ignoring renames. The only exception to this are known exercise renames:
- `bracket-push` was renamed to `matching-brackets`
- `retree` was renamed to `satellite`
- `resistor-colors` was renamed to `resistor-color-duo`
- `kindergarden-garden` was renamed to `kindergarten-garden`
## Exclusions
There are some commits that we skipped over, and which thus didn't influence the authors/contributors list:
- Commits authored by `dependabot[bot]`, `dependabot-preview[bot]` or `github-actions[bot]`
- Bulk update PRs made by `ErikSchierboom` or `kytrinx` to update the track
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