On 21/05/2019 15:44, Jeff Law wrote: > On 5/21/19 8:24 AM, Richard Earnshaw (lists) wrote: >> On 20/05/2019 23:42, Joseph Myers wrote: >> >>> I'm not particularly concerned with distinguishing between different names >>> and email addresses for an author depending on when or in what capacity >>> they contributed a change, or with the cases where a patch was committed >>> for someone else and SVN simply doesn't provide a way to distinguish that >>> information. However, since some people were concerned with that, and >>> since the feature needed for that was implemented (the "changelogs" >>> feature in reposurgeon, which will do it as long as a proper ChangeLog >>> entry was included in the commit), we may as well use that feature. (The >>> author map is still needed for commits without ChangeLog entries.) >>> >> >> For very old commits, back in the GCC 2 days, even the ChangeLogs don't >> always show the author. At that time only the committers' name was >> used. I'm pretty sure that some of my earliest patches to GCC were >> committed by tege and kenner under their names. So we'll never really >> be able to fully reconstruct the early history. > I'd say we make a reasonable effort here, but the importance of > authorship decays rapidly the further back we go. Even when the author > (or committer) is still around, they often can't remember the details > around commits from that era. > > jeff >
Agreed, and I'm well aware of my limitation on remembering which of those early patches were mine. I was just pointing out that the ChangeLogs from that period cannot be taken as an indication of authorship. There's a fair chance that, if it was Arm related and dated from mid 1992 onwards, I had a hand in it. But that's by no means a claim on all such patches from that era. R.
