Attributing the contributions

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Vadim Zeitlin

One of the lesser, but still appreciable, benefits of switching to Git is that now we can properly record the author of the commit (e.g. the author of a patch), in addition to the (less important) person who committed it (e.g. me). While we tried to do this manually in the change log before, this couldn’t be done for all the changes as the change log only mentions the most important ones and, sometimes, could be forgotten even for those changes for which it should have been done.

With Git, things are much more straightforward and you just need to provide your identity with your patch. The simplest way to do it is to use git format-patch command – after ensuring that your name and email are correctly configured locally, of course. But you could also just mention them in your Trac ticket or wx-dev email and we’ll use them when committing your changes (note for committers: you can always set GIT_AUTHOR_{NAME,EMAIL} for a particular commit to set the authorship information by hand).

Looking forward to your patches – which will be now properly attributed to you instead of boosting my own commit stats!