From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Howells Subject: How best to handle multiple-authorship commits in GIT? Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:25:09 +0000 Organization: Red Hat UK Ltd. Registered Address: Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SI4 1TE, United Kingdom. Registered in England and Wales under Company Registration No. 3798903 Message-ID: <21056.1328185509@redhat.com> Cc: dhowells@redhat.com, valerie.aurora@gmail.com To: git@vger.kernel.org X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Thu Feb 02 13:25:31 2012 Return-path: Envelope-to: gcvg-git-2@plane.gmane.org Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.180.67]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Rsvj9-0002Sf-C9 for gcvg-git-2@plane.gmane.org; Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:25:23 +0100 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756009Ab2BBMZP (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Feb 2012 07:25:15 -0500 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:56695 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755904Ab2BBMZO (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Feb 2012 07:25:14 -0500 Received: from int-mx12.intmail.prod.int.phx2.redhat.com (int-mx12.intmail.prod.int.phx2.redhat.com [10.5.11.25]) by mx1.redhat.com (8.14.4/8.14.4) with ESMTP id q12CPC1V019970 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=OK); Thu, 2 Feb 2012 07:25:13 -0500 Received: from redhat.com ([10.3.112.8]) by int-mx12.intmail.prod.int.phx2.redhat.com (8.14.4/8.14.4) with ESMTP id q12CP9Yh008136; Thu, 2 Feb 2012 07:25:11 -0500 X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.68 on 10.5.11.25 Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Archived-At: 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. David