Hi, could you quote and link docs on the AUTHORS file standard? I'm interested in what advantages the split-out AUTHORS file has over the current authors=[...] field in setup.py or extracting authors from the git log.

More googling yielded https://opensource.google/docs/releasing/authors/, which outlines how an AUTHORS file (1) delineates who has copyrights to the open-source project and (2) creates a central place to acknowledge contributors' work. Seems worth a look to me. Then again, git log --format=format:'%aN <%aE>' | awk '!x[$0]++' or whatever powers Github's repo insights also can shows who committed, and possibly when and how much.

Hi. AUTHORS file may be a platform-independent (git/github) alternative to acknowledge contributors' work. It is also a common, good practice in open source projects.

It looks like no SPDX repository has an AUTHORS file, so, if you are interested in, you could follow the style of the license-expression library's one, (which is maintained by tools-python's maintainer, who, by the way, suggested adding this file).