Re: How do I set the committer with cherry-pick? (or is there a better way to get changes from someone?)

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

"Pat Maddox" <pergesu@gmail.com> writes:

> And finally, when I experimented with doing a pull instead of
> cherry-pick, it listed the original author as the committer instead of
> myself.  I think you're absolutely right that the burden should be on
> them, so I can tell them to create a clean commit branch and just pull
> from it, but I still need to be listed as the committer.

Well, at that point, you are not the committer for their changes on their
clean history, and you shouldn't expect to be recorded as such.  Your
contribution to the project might still be recorded as the committer of
the merge commit that pulled their contributions in, though.

Any history is just as valid as your integration branch's history.  There
may be hundreds of potential histories in the universe --- each and every
contributor, anybody who clones and plays with the project may create his
own history.  Each contributor in their repository will be commiting their
changes and building their histories.  If one of these alternative
histories is so agreeable for you that makes you happy to pull from it,
that means the creator of that history did extra work to keep it clean (or
rebuilt it to look like clean).  Give the contributor the credit for his
own segment of the history when you merge from him.

Among these many alternate histories, yours may happen to be the one many
people consider more authoritative than others', but other than that, you
are not any more special than them.

That's what distributed means.