On Feb 2, 2012, at 4:25, David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> wrote:
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>
> Hi,
>
> I've been assigned a stack of patches to maintain and try and get upstream by
> my employer. Most of the patches currently have the authorship set to Val,
> but since I'll be maintaining them if they go in upstream and I've changed
> them a lot, I feel I should reassign the author field to myself so people
> pester me rather than Val with questions about them. However, I don't want to
> deny Val or any other contributor credit for their work on the patches.
>
> I can see a number of ways of doing this, and am wondering which will be best:
>
> (1) Ascribe multiple authorship directly in the commit. I suspect this would
> require a change to GIT and its associated tools. That way I could put my
> name in the priority pestering spot, but doing a search on authorship
> would still credit Val and others.
>
> (2) Add an extra tag 'Originally-authored-by' (or maybe 'Coauthored-by' as I
> saw someone recommend) in amongst the 'Signed-off-by' list. But that
> doesn't give them credit in a gitweb search without changing gitweb.
>
> (3) Don't actually modify Val's commits to bring them up to date, but rather
> create a historical GIT tree with Val's commits committed as-are and then
> add my changes to the top in a number of large merge commits (there have
> been multiple major breakages due to different merge windows).
>
> I dislike this approach because it doesn't produce a nice set of patches I
> can give to someone to review (which is a must). Plus, for the most part,
> it's actually easier to port Val's patches individually.
>
> Can GIT be modified to do (1)? Gitweb's display need only show one of the
> authors in the single-row-per-patch list mode, but should find a patch by any
> of the authors in an author search and should display all the authors in the
> commit display.
>
> David
Thanks, David! I had the same trouble with my set: while I entirely rewrote some patches, I still felt Jan Blunck deserved primary credit. I don't recall my solution, but I'm fine with mentioning my name in the commit message (and I think Jan should get credit too).
In general, this is a big problem for motivating contributors in other cases. Some maintainers have a habit of trivially rewriting patches so that, technically, no line is the same, then taking authorship and giving the actual author an ambiguous Signed-off-by. David hasn't done this here, of course - these are major rewrites - but when someone does all the hard work of finding and fixing a problem, the credit shouldn't go to the person who prettied it up. There is a line in the kernel doc saying how this should be handled, suggested by Rusty, but it's not being followed.
First class support for multiple authorship would be a big way to motivate contributors.
-VAL