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A Python script for listing the authors in a git repository, in order of their first contribution

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A micro Python script for listing the authors in a git repository sorted by
the time of their first contribution. Traits:

* Properly deals with the byte stream emitted by `git log`.
* Supports Python 2.7 and 3.4.
* Supports Linux and Windows.

This has been created mainly for educational purposes. Please read
[the corresponding article on my blog](https://gehrcke.de/2015/06/git-list-authors-sorted-by-the-time-of-their-first-contribution/).

## Usage

```
$ git log --encoding=utf-8 --full-history --reverse "--format=format:%at;%an;%ae" | \
    git-authors > authors-by-first-contrib.txt
```

`git-authors` writes a formatted list of authors to stdout. The data is
UTF-8-encoded. Lines are separated by a single `\n` character.

## Resource consumption

This script implements on-the-fly stream processing and uses an efficient
data structure for keeping track of authors. It therefore requires almost
no memory and just a little amount of CPU power. The resource requirements
for analyzing a repository are therefore predominantly dictated by whatever
`git log` consumes.

`git log` performs reasonably fast even for large repositories: with git
version 2.1.4, analysis of the Linux repository (with more than 500.000
commits) takes about 7 seconds on a rather slow test machine.

## Notes

* Clearly, the output of this script might need higher intelligence for
  meaningful interpretation, such as for detecting when the same author
  has used different names.

* The contribution date is extracted from the git data field `%at`, also
  known as the "author date". See http://stackoverflow.com/a/11857467/145400.

* It is not uncommon for an author to use different email addresses over
  time. Hence, authors are distinguished by their name only (specifically, by
  the git data field `%an`).

* The output of `git log` may contain byte sequences that are invalid in the
  UTF-8 codec. These get replaced with a question mark in the output. For
  details about how git handles text encoding internally, see
  http://git-scm.com/docs/git-log#_discussion.

* The note above is valid, independent of the `--encoding=utf-8` option.

* It seems that the `--encoding` option of `git log` has been removed in quite
  recent git releases. Remove it from the command line if you observe a
  corresponding error.
 
* If this script breaks because it came across an author with a semicolon in
  his/her name, then blame Little Bobby Tables' mom (https://xkcd.com/327).

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