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

[Ihor Radchenko]

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/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
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