Contributor vs Committer

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Thorsten Glaser

about 1 month ago

For some projects, I am only a contributor, not a committer… take for example this commit:

https://www.ohloh.net/projects/pcc/commits/21271617

I did send that in, and gmcgarry committed it on my behalf.

Is there a way to claim these for oneself? I’ve got quite a lot of them spread around various projects, some with some without explicit crediting my name.


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Robin Luckey

about 1 month ago

Hi Throsten,

No, Ohloh does not yet have the ability to claim individual commits.

There is a lot of discussion around this, and while it won't happen soon it is something that we are looking at for the future.


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Thorsten Glaser

about 1 month ago

I wonder what the criteria for automatic detection, such as in (a), are, and what is the difference to (b), which is not auto-detected.

a) https://www.ohloh.net/projects/perl/commits/22428885

b) https://www.ohloh.net/projects/xfree86/commits/23280979


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Robin Luckey

about 1 month ago

Hi Thorsten... I'm afraid I don't understand your question. What do you mean by "automatic detection"? I'm not sure what difference between a and b you are referring to.


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Thorsten Glaser

about 1 month ago

Ah.

Well, I submitted both a and b to the respective projects, and they were committed by a developer with commit access, not by me. Both commit messages mention my name.

However, while a is attributed to me, b is not.

Now, where is the difference, or, what made the code scanner recognise that a is mine? If people knew that, they could cope with the system by formatting log messages appropriately or something.

Interestingly enough, a (and some GNU Libtool commits) were attributed to me before I even joined this site.


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Robin Luckey

about 1 month ago

Ah, OK, this is actually pretty easy to explain.

A great feature of Git is that it has separate fields to record both the committer's name and the original author's name. This means that even if you didn't create the actual commit yourself, the Git repository preserves your name as the original author.

CVS and Subversion of course don't have a dedicated place to store the original author's name, which leads to an explosion of various methods of putting author names into the comment field. Ohloh doesn't try to parse author names out of comment fields. Every project has its own way of doing this, and many committers are inconsistent when adding this information.


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Thorsten Glaser

about 1 month ago

Ah, okay. I never used git, so I could not imagine. Thanks for clearing up. Sad, though.


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mugwump

about 1 month ago

Putting RFC822-style e-mail headers in commit messages to have this information is one practice I've seen in at least two places already.