Re: co-authoring commits

[josh@joshtriplett.org]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 06:52:24PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 10:26:32PM +0200, Tuncer Ayaz wrote:
> > 
> > By allowing multiple authors, you don't have to decide who's the
> > primary author, as in such situations usually there is no primary at
> > all. I sometimes deliberately override the author when committing and
> > add myself just as another co-author in the commit message, but as
> > others have noted it would be really great if we can just specify
> > multiple authors.
> 
> Just recently, there a major thread on the IETF mailing list where
> IETF working group had drafts where people were listed as co-authors
> without their permission, and were upset that the fact that their name
> was added made it seem as if they agreed with the end product.  (i.e.,
> that they were endorsing the I-D).  So while adding formal coauthor
> might solves (a few) problems, it can also introduce others.
> 
> Ultimately there is one person who can decide which parts of the
> changes to put in the commit that gets sent to the maintainer.  So
> there *is* someone who is the primary author; the person who takes the
> final pass on the patch and then hits the send key.

I've worked on many patches with another person in a shared screen
session, co-authoring a series of patches and commit messages in vim,
and writing an email in mutt.  There were, ultimately, two people
deciding what to put in a commit and send to the maintainer.  This is,
admittedly, unusual, but pair programming is not ridiculously uncommon.

> In that case, perhaps you could set the from field to a mailing list
> address.

The "From" field in email headers supports a list of comma-separated
addresses, just like To and Cc.  Speaking from experience, this
more-or-less works with all the mail software we tried it with, with the
occasional program only displaying the first or last entry.

- Josh Triplett