On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 10:05:14PM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > Josh Triplett wrote[1]: > > I fairly often work on a commit with other people, and I want the > > commit metadata to reflect that by showing multiple authors for one > > commit. > > This has come up a few times recently[2][3][4], with the best workaround > suggested being Andreas’s > > Co-authored-by: Some One <[email protected]>
I do something similar; all my pair-programmed commits have a note at the end of the commit message saying Commit by Josh Triplett and Jamey Sharp. I'd just like git to have real metadata for this case. > As you mentioned, emails are allowed to have multiple authors, and > there is no reason in principle some faraway future git version could > not similarly handle them: > > 1. Teach _everyone_ who parses git objects (in git.git and elsewhere) > to process ‘coauthor’ lines after the committer line. Unlike > the ‘author’ line, these would not have a date attached. I'd suggest just using multiple "author" lines for this, for two reasons: - Some tools might already handle this in a sensible way without breaking. For instance, git show and git log seem to do the right thing already. - It seems odd to have one author listed as "author" and others as "coauthor". Also, I don't see any reason not to have the date attached to each author; it can contain the same date, or under some circumstances it might make sense for it to contain a different date. And that way, tools designed to parse "author" will not need to allow for the lack of a date. Multiple "committer" fields seems like an equally reasonable thing to add support for at the same time, by the way. > 2. Teach ‘git fsck’ (and hence index-pack, etc) to warn about them but > not error out. git fsck seems to work just fine with multiple author fields in a commit. git fast-import needs fixing, though; it currently crashes if given multiple author fields. > 3. Add a configuration variable to allow git to produce > multiple-author commits. Such commits would make the repository > unusable by versions of git without (1) and (2), so probably nobody > would want to enable this for a while. Agreed; the usual backward-compatibility delay. > Sounds doable but a lot of trouble. Maybe Nicolas Pitre or Shawn Pearce > could say more if you want to pursue this. > > Alternatively, maybe format-patch, fast-import/fast-export, and am > should cheat by processing Co-authored-by lines at the top of the final > paragraph of the commit message themselves. Even with Git's current support for Signed-off-by, it still makes a point of generally not parsing the commit message in any way. That seems like a feature worth preserving. > BTW, thanks for all your work on git. Your bug reports are a lot of > fun to read. Thanks! Always nice to hear. :) > What do you think? I have this on my long-term TODO list to implement at some point, when I scrounge up enough round tuits. :) - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
