On Mon, Apr 6, 2026 at 7:47 AM John Naylor <[email protected]> wrote: > That's not how I interpreted it at all, and after seeing commits with > both "Author" and "Co-authored-by" I am equally confused as to how > people are interpreting it.
In case it helps, here's what I had always assumed the meanings were without consulting the wiki, with links to commits I've made so you can roast my usage. - "Author" overrides the default assumption, which is that the committer was the author of the patch: https://postgr.es/c/a6483f5ac - "Co-authored-by" lists co-authors, who share attribution in some unspecified way. (GitHub adds a weak mechanical effect to this tag.) https://postgr.es/c/993368113 - Some people list multiple Author: lines as an alternative to Co-authored-by:, which never particularly bothered me. - If attribution is more complex than that, people just say that in the body of the message: https://postgr.es/c/c2bca7cc9 In particular, if I don't want official "credit" in the release notes for minor changes I made to a patch during commit, I don't need to add any tag at all. I just mention that I changed the patch, following a style I've seen from Tom and others: https://postgr.es/c/e020a897e > My take is that the co-author tag has backfired and made things less > clear. If we are using it inconsistently, then it doesn't convey any > useful information. It conveys *attribution*, regardless of whether or not it's used consistently for a mechanical purpose. I'm willing to bet that "I coauthored this patch" has intuitive meaning to most people, inside and outside this project. I'm glad the momentum appears to be in favor of keeping that attribution, because the idea that we'd retroactively discard it seems... misguided, to me. This is going to be fuzzy in complex cases, but it's okay to just write the complexity longhand when needed, right? --Jacob
