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

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:57:18 -0800 (PST)

Valerie Aurora <[email-masked]> 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