Acknowledgements in the Manual

[John W. Eaton]

On 17-Apr-2007, Søren Hauberg wrote:

|    In the Preface of the manual there is a section called 
| "Acknowledgements". This section contains an autogenerated list of 
| people who have contributed to Octave. I don't mind seeing my own name 
| in print, but I think the list of people look so autogenerated that it 
| should be removed. If it stays in, I think it at least could look a 
| little less autogenerated by

The list was generated by extracting all the names I could find from
all the ChangeLog entries.  In the past, we had a shorter list of
people and a summary of their contributions.  I'd be happy to go back
to that kind of list, but deciding who has made a contribution
significant enough to be included in the list is not something I
really want to do.

|    * Remove "John W. Eaton" from the list as the introduction "In 
| addition to John W. Eaton...".

Instead I changed the text that precedes the list to be

  Many people have already contributed to Octave's development.  The
  following people have helped write parts of Octave or helped out in
  various other ways (listed alphbetically).

|    * Remove duplicate people such as "From Michael Goffioul" and 
| "Michael Goffioul".

Done.

|    I think it's great to give thanks to contributors, but perhaps this 
| list could appear only on the webpage?

I think it should also appear in the manual.  Maybe there is a better
way to format it?  Perhaps in columns using @multitable?

jwe