Re: co-authoring commits

From: Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 18, 2015, 21:25 UTC
Message-ID: <55833758.6010000@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq381q551o.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> josh@joshtriplett.org writes:
>
>> Author and committer are used by many git tools; if they weren't part of
>> the object header, they'd need to be part of some pseudo-header with a
>> standardized format that git can parse.
>
> Yes, the same goes to the address on Signed-off-by: footers.  There
> recently was a series to enhance the footer list handling (Christian
> Cc'ed) for the generation and maintenance side, and I do think it is
> reasonable to further add enhanced support for footers.
>
> That does not argue for having a new "coauthor" as a new commit
> object header at all, though.

The threshold for modifying commit object is high. This is an ABI-level change, something to do if there is no other solution.

Author and committer include datetime in the contents of the field, which is used by Git for heuristics limiting walk. Coauthor would have the same date as author, isn't it? If, after long and involved discussion, we didn't add 'generation' field (for easier cutting history walking), what chance adding 'coauthor' has.

OTOH it would be nice to have support for .mailmap, and for grepping... but the former could conceivably be added to the trailer tool, the latter can be done with appropriate regexp in "git log --grep=...".

I wonder what would break if one used 'Name <e@mai.l>, Name <em@i.l>' as the author...

-- 
Jakub Narębski