From: Jakub Narebski Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:57:18 GMT Subject: Re: How best to handle multiple-authorship commits in GIT? Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <9B990DDC-858D-43BA-BF9E-E0C3435354AF@gmail.com> Valerie Aurora 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. > 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