Re: [gentoo-dev] Please retain authorship of contributed patches

[Sam Jorna]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 09:23:56PM +0000, Andrey Utkin wrote:
> The difference between my submission and final variant by Matthew is big
> in number of lines, but is trivial in content as you can see below, so I
> don't believe that Matthew has written his variant from scratch on his
> own (he hasn't given any note on tickets on bugs.g.o or github), it
> seems more like intentional swapping and amending original lines
> retaining identical outcome.
>
> Not that authorship of one or two commits is so crucial for me, or that
> I'm the most ambitious wannabe-contributor. Hell, there's not much of
> code at all in the ebuild - it's trivial; but also not much is needed
> here to give credit. I have contributed to quite some FOSS projects, and
> have run into theft of my patches a couple of times, and it never was by
> pure accident.

Though I wasn't involved in these commits, I have seen how easy and
accidental it is to lose authorship information on a commit. That being
said, finding where to draw the line on authorship can be difficult.

I'm not sure how many others are aware of this, but I'll mention it just
in case: provided it's done before pushing commits, the commit metadata
and message can be amended locally with

  git commit --amend --author="Joe Smith <jsmith@×××××××.blah>"

This will update the Author tag but leave the Committer tag untouched
(and will allow fixing any problems with the commit message itself).
Amending commits that are not the tip of your local clone will probably
need an interactive rebase though (but I could be wrong about that).

-- 
Sam Jorna (wraeth)
GPG ID: 0xD6180C26