The Supercite package was derived from its predecessor Superyank 1.11 which was inspired by various bits of code and ideas from Martin Neitzel and Ashwin Ram. They were the folks who came up with the idea of non-nested citations and implemented some rough code to provide this style. Superyank and Supercite version 2 evolved to the point where much of the attribution selection mechanism was automatic, and features have been continuously added through the comments and suggestions of the Supercite mailing list participants.
With version 3, Supercite underwent an almost complete rewrite, benefiting in a number of ways, including vast improvements in the speed of performance, a big reduction in size of the code and in the use of Emacs resources, and a much cleaner and flexible internal architecture. Most of this work was internal and not of very great importance to the casual user. There were some changes at the user-visible level, but for the most part, the Supercite configuration variables from version 2 should still be relevant to version 3. Hopefully Supercite version 3 is faster, smaller, and much more flexible than its predecessors.
In the version 2 manual I thanked some specific people for their help in
developing Supercite 2. You folks know who you are and your continued
support is greatly appreciated. I wish to thank everyone on the
Supercite mailing list, especially the brave alpha testers, who helped
considerably in testing out the concepts and implementation of Supercite
version 3. Special thanks go out to the MUA and Emacs authors Kyle
Jones, Stephen Gildea, Richard Stallman, and Jamie Zawinski for coming
to a quick agreement on the new mail-citation-hook interface, and
for adding the magic lisp to their code to support this.
All who have helped and contributed have been greatly appreciated.
Supercite was written by Barry Warsaw.