Re: [PATCH] commit: add --committer option

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 11, 2025, 19:15 UTC
Message-ID: <20251111191508.GA1907007@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAOLTT8RweGOmxNK=vKDv8w-8AJM7QUfLBw4WOKeY1EpSVeB6iQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Nov 11, 2025 at 09:42:38PM +0800, ZheNing Hu wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> > Is a "--committer" option the best solution there, though? I'd think
> > you'd want to set user.* in the repo-level .git/config (or using a
> > dir-specific include) would be less error-prone.
> >
> > That doesn't help for using two identities for the same repo, but in my
> > experience it is easier to use two separate repositories for that to
> > match the organization of the work (even if you may sometimes fetch
> > between them).
> >
> > I'm not totally opposed to the new flag, and in general I'd defer to
> > people who say they find a new feature useful. I'm just having a hard
> > time imagining a scenario where it's the best option.
> 
> Sometimes it's because I forgot to configure the repository-level git user
> config and started development first. Only when I tried to correct the
> committer did I feel the pain.

OK, this workflow does make sense to me. Fixing up an earlier mistake is inherently a one-off thing, and a command-line option is more ergonomic than using the environment variables.

Two small thoughts:

  - I suspect what you'd usually want there is for the committer and the
    author to match. We have --committer-date-is-author-date for rebase,
    and conceptually I think something like --committer-is-author would
    do what you want here. But obviously it's less flexible, and I don't
    know if it's that much easier to use.

  - Because it's easy to make such mistakes, when you override the
    author (so that it doesn't match the committer), git-commit prints
    an extra "Author:" line in the output to make that more obvious.
    Should we do the same with committer when you've overridden it?  We
    already do print "Committer:" when the ident was guessed from system
    info, but I wonder if it would make sense to print when it was
    forced. I dunno. I guess the time you most need the hint is when you
    meant to use --committer and --author together, but only used
    --author. But I don't know how Git would infer that case (versus the
    normal case of you applying someone else's work and crediting them
    with --author).

I'm not sure if either is a useful direction, but they seemed sufficiently not-dumb for me to at least type them out. ;)

-Peff