Quoth David Edmondson on Nov 16 at  4:58 pm:
> On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:18:43 -0500, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> > [1] Except for 2 emacs tests that depend on author order.  What order
> > are matched authors *supposed* to be in?
> 
> In IRC cworth confirmed that he considered the current behaviour a bug,
> which is to say that the authors should be sorted by first occurrence in
> the thread.

Ah, perfect.  That's what my patch does most naturally.