Re: co-authoring commits

From: Tuncer Ayaz <tuncer.ayaz@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 19, 2015, 21:11 UTC
Message-ID: <CAOvwQ4gYsQtZPWOA+1gBtdw9XkjQ4WGipk9grb+_ad9iiBj5Og@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <55845CFE.4070407@gmail.com>

On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 8:18 PM, Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

> On 2015-06-18 at 23:25, Tuncer Ayaz wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 12:52 AM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 10:26:32PM +0200, Tuncer Ayaz wrote:
> [...]
> > > One could imagine some frankly, quite rare example where there
> > > is a team of people who votes on each commit before it gets sent
> > > out and where everyone is equal and there is no hierarchy. In
> > > that case, perhaps you could set the from field to a mailing
> > > list address. But honestly, how often is that *all* of the
> > > authors are completely equal[1]?
> >
> > For that case something like patchwork, phabricator, or gerrit
> > seems to be the logical tool to use, and should ideally leave a
> > trace of approvals and such in the resulting commit message(s). If
> > the patch management tool takes care of merging the commit(s), it
> > can be harder to misattribute signed-off/reviewed-by/etc, which is
> > a good thing.
>
> Doesn't Gerrit (at least) use trailer-like structured *notes* in the
> 'reviews' category (i.e. refs/notes/reviews ref) to store
> information about review process?

Don't remember if it does specifically, but I'm sure it can be configured to. I know Phabricator appends a lot upon doing the commit. I'll have to check it the next time I happen to use Gerrit.

Show 9 quoted lines

> > You could of course use multiple (everybody makes their own)
> > commits, where you risk breaking bisectability and avoid the need
> > for equal co-authorship support. In pair programming such
> > intermediate commits will quite often be fixups, and when you
> > attempt to squash the fixups for bisectability's sake, you may get
> > a desire for co-authorship of the resulting commit.
>
> Hmmm... I didn't think about the problem of attributing authorship
> for squashed commits. Though here multiple 'author' headers, or

Strictly speaking, in a live pair programming session usually the one currently typing will be corrected by the other dev, and the roles will switch when the typist changes.

> multiline 'author' header would be a better match than 'coauthor'
> header (which itself doesn't need, I think, the date filed, or does
> it?)

What makes sense to me is that the date is decoupled from the list of authors and there is one date only. I think of it as an expanded version of the previously single-entry author field, where the limit has been lifted. With my purely git-user hat on, that is.

So, yes, a multiline author header sounds like a solution to me. Maybe it should be sorted alphabetically upon commit regardless of the order of --author ONE --author TWO.

> [This is sent from Thunderbird news, so it should be all right]

This is fine, the other one was broken. Out of curiosity what's the difference between Thunderbird email and news?