Re: How best to handle multiple-authorship commits in GIT?

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 2, 2012, 19:57 UTC
Message-ID: <m3bophc8je.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <9B990DDC-858D-43BA-BF9E-E0C3435354AF@gmail.com>

Valerie Aurora <valerie.aurora@gmail.com> writes:

> [...]  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).

That's what various *-by headers are for. Signed-off-by is for provenance.

Nb. you can search the whole commit message in gitweb, not only author
or committer.

> 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.

Maybe it was cause by tools accidentally stealing authorship? With "git commit --amend --author=..." it is now easy to add authorship back.

Show 5 quoted lines

> 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.

Link?

> First class support for multiple authorship would be a big way to
> motivate contributors.

Well, multi-line commit headers were only recently added to git (when adding signed pull / singed commit stuff), but I think in many places git assumes single authorship, and it would be hard to change...

There was some workaround that people doing pair programming invented, IIRC...

-- 
Jakub Narebski