I feel that for some folks—especially those new to the project—seeing
their name in the commit message might serve as a small motivation to
review more. The practice of including the author name I believe has
been around since the SVN days or the patch days, or even earlier,
when committers used to apply patches manually. Back then, unless the
committer explicitly added the author, the commit would default to the
committer’s name, and figuring out the actual author email from JIRA
wasn’t always straightforward.
If the consensus is to not include reviewer names in commit messages,
that’s totally fine with me—it’s one less thing to worry about.
Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion here. Even if my name
doesn’t appear as the author or reviewer for a change I was involved
in, it doesn't really matter to me anymore. I think many folks who’ve
been in the ecosystem for a while probably feel the same.
That said, I can’t really recall if seeing my name early on gave me a
sense of validation—but maybe it did. And if it helps newer
contributors, especially those who aren’t yet recognized committers,
feel a bit more involved or valued, then I’m okay putting in that
extra bit of effort if it makes someone’s day.
That said, tracking down real names from GitHub handles can sometimes
be a bit of a pain and a time sink for committers. So, if the group
prefers to skip reviewer names, I’m perfectly fine with that too. Most
of the projects I know don't do that or ever did it. Just to
reiterate—it doesn’t matter much to me personally, but I’m happy to go
with whatever the group finds more useful, especially the non
committers.
As for the author field—GitHub already shows the author name, so it
does feel a bit redundant to include it explicitly, so dropping that
is totally f9
+1
-Ayush
On Tue, 8 Apr 2025 at 21:15, Shohei Okumiya <oku...@apache.org> wrote:
>
> +1 for the author part.
>
> Regarding the reviewers' names, I have one thouht from a bit diffrent angle.
> The number of reviewers is always the biggest bottleneck. If the small praize
> motivates people and they try one more review, it is meaningful. But I don't
> have any evidence about how many people feel so. So, I'm not stick with it.
> By the way, I am fairly happy to see my name in the commit history.
>
> In short, I agree to remove the author's name. I can still add reviewers'
> GitHub user names(identifying real names is often tough) if we believe it
> could motivate a meaningful number of people.
>
> Thanks,
> Okumin
>
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2025 at 23:35 Zsolt Miskolczi <zsolt.miskol...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> +1.
>>
>> I don't see the value in that.
>>
>> Attila Turoczy <aturo...@cloudera.com.invalid> ezt írta (időpont: 2025. ápr.
>> 8., K, 16:32):
>>>
>>> +1.It's a thoughtful gesture for reviewers, but if it creates headaches for
>>> the dev's and adds unnecessary steps, I think we can live without it.
>>>
>>> -Attila
>>>
>>> On Tue, Apr 8, 2025 at 4:27 PM Stamatis Zampetakis <zabe...@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> How do you feel about dropping the contributor and reviewer names from
>>>> the commit summary?
>>>>
>>>> Before:
>>>> HIVE-28884: Decouple source.q test from SRC dataset (Stamatis
>>>> Zampetakis reviewed by Soumyakanti Das, Zsolt Miskolczi, Shohei
>>>> Okumiya, Simhadri Govindappa)
>>>>
>>>> After:
>>>> HIVE-28884: Decouple source.q test from SRC dataset
>>>>
>>>> The main goal is to increase developers productivity and reduce
>>>> boilerplate information.
>>>>
>>>> In many cases the extra information is longer than the commit summary
>>>> itself. Every time I merge a PR I have to spend 2-3 minutes editing
>>>> the commit message and figuring out the names of every person that is
>>>> involved in the PR.
>>>>
>>>> Moreover, the "Author" information is already present in the commit
>>>> metadata and the reviewers are clearly shown and tracked under the
>>>> respective PR in GitHub so removing them from the commit summary does
>>>> not result in loss of information.
>>>>
>>>> The PR id is always present in the commit message (either in the
>>>> summary or in the body) so we can easily fetch all the necessary
>>>> information (even more and more structured) about contributors and
>>>> reviewers of certain PR via the GitHub UI or programmatically via REST
>>>> or GraphQL.
>>>>
>>>> For instance the following GitHub GraphQL query can be used to obtain
>>>> the name of the author of the PR and the names of the reviewers that
>>>> approved the PR.
>>>>
>>>> {
>>>> repository(owner: "apache", name: "hive") {
>>>> pullRequest(number: 5750) {
>>>> title
>>>> author {
>>>> ... on User {
>>>> name
>>>> }
>>>> }
>>>> reviews(first: 100, states: APPROVED) {
>>>> nodes {
>>>> author {
>>>> ... on User {
>>>> name
>>>> }
>>>> }
>>>> }
>>>> }
>>>> }
>>>> }
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>> Best,
>>>> Stamatis
