[bomewish]

It’s just so obnoxious is the main thing. Imagine citing every piece of software one uses for writing a paper — the citation list would be endless. C, Unix, Fortran… the list goes on. Why is this particular utility so different and special? Just such a jerk move and it makes me and many others aggravated at the arrogance of the author.

[fbdab103]

I am somewhat tickled at the thought of citing everything in a malicious compliance kind of way. Given a Nix environment, it should be possible to pull down a list of every bit of code that was used to construct the OS. Would we have to differentiate between installed vs executed code? My Latex environment probably has thousands of packages, though I might directly only include a handful of them. Even if I include a Latex package, it might not get executed.

The CITATION.cff format[0] is a newish format to solve the machine identification of citable works, but I suspect it is too new to see widespread adoption. It is going to take some backbreaking regexes to extract "How to Cite" sections embedded in READMEs and buried in the source.

[0] https://citation-file-format.github.io/