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

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Hi,

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 1:25 PM, David Howells <dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 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.

I always thought of the author field as being an indication of who is
ultimately responsible for its implementation (the one in the
pestering spot). (1) may seem desirous, but doesn't (2) seem like a
cleaner and more maintainable solution? Gitweb will show the entire
log message if people are interested in the exact change, right?

Cheers,
Frans
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html


[Index of Archives]     [Linux Kernel Development]     [Gcc Help]     [IETF Annouce]     [DCCP]     [Netdev]     [Networking]     [Security]     [V4L]     [Bugtraq]     [Yosemite]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux Security]     [Linux RAID]     [Linux SCSI]     [Fedora Users]