Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to shell
scripts.
maint/thanks.sh autogenerates a list of contributors since a revision
(that you pass it on the command line), intended to make the work of
going through the shortlog a bit less manual. It can exclude
contributors' names given in maint/exclude_contributors.txt, in order to
filter out people who work for Tor, or who commit under more than one
name.
Nick Mathewson
eta