On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 12:24:18PM +0100, Michael J Gruber wrote: > Gunnar Wagner schrieb am 13.01.2015 um 09:15: > > I got APGL licensed code from someone else and want to post it on my > > github (without taking credit for the work) > > > > tried git commit --amend --author="Author name, www.website.com" but > > got an error message which said something like "original author not found" > > Can it be that the --amen --author only work if the author is on github > > himself? > > > > This has nothing to do with github. > > The author has be in the form "authorname <authoremail>". The important > parts for the format are the <>. Yes, but the error message is a hint that there is something else going on. When there are no angle brackets, some DWIM magic kicks in: git tries to find a matching author by walking the project history from HEAD. So you can do (in git.git): $ git commit --allow-empty -m foo --author=gruber [detached HEAD 73ef08b] foo Author: Michael J Gruber <git@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Of course that does not work if you do not already have commits from the person in your repository: $ git commit --allow-empty -m foo --author=foobar fatal: No existing author found with 'foobar' -Peff -- 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