Re: Author attribution of a patch

On Sun, Feb 08, 2015 at 10:07:55PM +0100, Stanislav Horáček wrote:

> I've created a help patch containing examples for DBCS functions as
> suggested by Jesper Hertel on the l10n mailing list [1]. In Gerrit review, I
> was advised to state his authorship [2], however I was not replied how to do
> it.

> Should Jesper send his licence statement to this list and should I change
> commiter's name to his name?

If you change the git fields, then the appropriate change is to set
the *author* to Jesper, not the committer. You are the
committer. Either you are both coauthors or he is author. And after
review in Gerrit, committer is changed to the one that pushed the
"submit" button anyway.

Alternatively, as Norbert said, you can just state the fact in the
commit message, as (I see) you already do since you write "by Jesper
Hortel".

(This email expresses no opinion on the desirability of a license
 statement by Jesper; see Norbert's email.)

> Or in general - how to deal with authorship of patches that are created as a
> result of some collaboration, e.g. in mailing list or bugzilla?

If there is one clear unique author, then the perfectionist thing to
do is set the *author* field to that person.

If there is collaboration in authorship, then in my experience, we
just put as author the one that ends up there automatically (through
git defaults) and credit the other one(s) in the commit message.

In all cases, making authorship clear in the commit message is
sufficient and adequate. The perfectionist thing to do is to include
email address / contact data for all authors in the commit message.

-- 
Lionel