Re: How to properly attribute authorship with Git (was Re: [PATCH] lisp/ob-shell.el: Also override explicit-shell-file-name)

[Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>]

Matt <matt@excalamus.com> writes:

>  > For future, we prefer keeping the original commit author in the "author"
>  > field of the commits - this is important to keep track of the number of
>  > changed lines for contributors without FSF copyright assignment.
>  
> Thank you for letting me know this is an issue.
>
> First, would you like me to update the commit?  If so, I will need guidance.  The correct procedure to change the author after committing to remote is unclear to me.  I would think it's something like sync my local copy with the latest remote version, update the author locally, and force push the change.  I would then expect that the next time someone pulls, it would update their local with the author change.  It would, however, cause a conflict, I think, for someone in the middle of making a change who has not synced with the forced push version and is trying to push their change.

We should avoid force pushing unless something is terribly broken.
What you may do instead is (1) revert the commit; (2) re-apply the
commit version with the correct author attribution.

> Second, I can update Worg with an explanation that it's important to credit authors using git's author field and how to do this.  Unless I missed it, worg/org-contribute makes no mention of the author field.  The version of git packaged by my distro is 2.41.0 and, AFAICT, has no -A flag for 'git' or 'git commit'.  However, the following works on my machine and, I guess, is the long option form:
>
>     git commit --author "Arthur Override <arthur-override's-email>"

You are right. Looks like -A is just Magit shortcut.

As for crediting authors, we may document it in https://orgmode.org/worg/org-maintenance.html#copyright
Although, it is under "core maintainer" section. Maybe we can make a
dedicated section for maintainers on how to deal with patch submissions.

> Third, this is at least the second time I've had issues working with a diff/patch.  The reason I submitted the change the way I did is that I could not get 'git apply <the-change>' to work.  I only got a useless error like "error: corrupt patch at line 10".  It's not clear to me if this is an error on my end or if the patch is indeed ill-formatted.  Can you confirm that the submitted patch is well-formatted?

There are several types of patches that may need to be applied
differently. Plain "diff" patches can be applied using git apply, while
maildir/.patch patches can be applied using git am.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
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