Re: Co-authoring and attribution in commit message

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

On 04 Oct 2019, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
>On 04.10.2019 8:52, Kévin Le Gouguec wrote:
>> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
>> 
>>> Just talking about attribution. So if it's fine with you, I can
>>> mention you in the commit message somehow.
>> Out of curiosity (apologies for meddling in), would this be the kind
>> of
>> situation where sticking a "Co-authored-by" makes sense?
>> (cf. CONTRIBUTE)
>
>It really would. If the commit was not already pushed, I'd have used
>your advice, thank you.

By the way, there are starting to be some standards for including these kinds of parseable facts in commit messages.

One place to look (and possibly to contribute a suggestion to) is https://www.conventionalcommits.org/.  Another, older standard is at http://subversion.apache.org/docs/community-guide/conventions.html#crediting, though I think it's only used in that one project.  The latter one looks like it's more directly relevant to this use case than Conventional Commits is, as it currently supports these fields:

   Patch by:
   Suggested by:
   Found by:
   Review by:
   Tested by:

"Co-authored-by:" is probably similar to "Patch by:".  Now, I think it still makes sense for us to use "Co-authored-by:", given that some (admittedly non-free-software) tools already parse it [1], but I wanted to make sure that these parallel efforts are known, so that we can learn whatever is available to be learned from them as we're setting a convention.

Best regards,
-Karl

[1] https://github.blog/2018-01-29-commit-together-with-co-authors/, as Kévin pointed out earlier