Re: Incorrect Author on patch

[Evan Lloyd <Evan.Lloyd@arm.com>]

One obvious way of precluding this sort of problem would be to move to using the pull request mechanism on GitHub, rather than requiring maintainers to play with upstreaming local patches.  I can well understand why it would be useful to use Gerrit as a means of reviewing a patch - actually a brilliant idea, but it does introduce problems. If, post review, the merge were  to be from a pull request then there would be no risk of "meta-data corruption".

Regards
Evan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com>
> Sent: 25 April 2018 22:15
> To: Evan Lloyd <Evan.Lloyd@arm.com>; ruiyu.ni@intel.com
> Cc: edk2-devel (edk2-devel@lists.01.org) <edk2-devel@lists.01.org>
> Subject: Re: [edk2] Incorrect Author on patch
>
> On 04/25/18 17:02, Evan Lloyd wrote:
> > Hi Ruiyu.
> > When we look at the edk2 git log, or GitHub
> >
> https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/commit/ee4dc24f57c32a445e7c747396c
> 9b
> > fbd8b221568 we see that Sami's AcpiView patch shows you as the Author.
> > I'm not sure what might have caused that (and it is obviously accidental), but
> it is a little unfortunate in that the commit doesn't show up on Sami's GitHub
> stats.
> > Fortunately, this is not currently significant for our organisation, although I'm
> sure Sami would prefer to have the credit.
> > This is a trivial matter, but you may wish to understand what caused it so that
> you don't accidentally upset someone for whom the stats are significant.
>
> Right, this occurred at least one other time as well: see commit
> 8b5c80e0296c ("MdeModulePkg/UefiBootManagerLib: fix
> AddLoadOptionVariable docs/prototype", 2018-04-23). Ray pushed the patch
> (so the Committer field is certainly right), but Ray's name+email replaced mine
> in the Author field. I had noticed that earlier, but now I'm seeing it as a pattern.
>
> I believe this is a tooling issue. I notice the following bit on the commit
> message:
>
>     Change-Id: I8a609d6502b6f8929b2f568acaa147065003b6f4
>
> I certainly didn't post the patch with that, and I doubt Ray added it manually.
> So, whatever tool Ray used to handle the patch lost the authorship
> information.
>
> And, I see the exact same kind of tag, namely
>
>     Change-Id: Ifa23dc80ab8ab042c56e88424847e796a8122a7c
>
> on commit ee4dc24f57c3 ("ShellPkg: Add acpiview tool to dump ACPI tables",
> 2018-04-23), which you mention.
>
> ... In fact, my patch happens to be the direct ancestor of Sami's, in the git
> history, and their commit times are just ~3 minutes apart. I'm quite certain Ray
> has started using a new tool.
>
> For example, commit bc2288f59ba2 ("UefiCpuPkg/MpInitLib: put
> mReservedApLoopFunc in executable memory", 2018-03-08) was also
> committed by Ray, *but* Jian's authorship was preserved fine. (No "Change-
> Id" either.)
>
> ... Oh... it looks like those Change-Id's were added by Gerrit:
>
> https://git.eclipse.org/r/Documentation/user-changeid.html
>
> And then, please look at this:
>
> https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/error-invalid-
> author.html
>
>     For every pushed commit Gerrit verifies that the e-mail address of
>     the author matches one of the registered e-mail addresses of the
>     pushing user. If this is not the case pushing the commit fails with
>     the error message "invalid author". This policy can be bypassed by
>     having the access right 'Forge Author'.
>
> Uh, what?... Gerrit says "invalid author" if Ray pushes a patch that wasn't
> authored by himself? And the option to override that is called "forge" author?
> O_o
>
> Anyway, the page continues,
>
>     If pushing to Gerrit fails with the error message "invalid author"
>     and somebody else is author of the commit for which the push fails,
>     then you have no permissions to forge the author identity. In this
>     case you may contact the project owner to request the access right
>     '+1 Forge Author Identity' in the 'Forge Identity' category or ask
>     the maintainer to commit this change on the author’s behalf.
>
> Ray, if you absolutely must use Gerrit, please make sure that you have the '+1
> Forge Author Identity' access right. IMO, we maintainers are responsible for
> preserving git metadata the best we can.
>
> (For example, if a patch is applied from the mailing list with "git am", it
> preserves the authorship information -- the documentation says, 'The commit
> author name is taken from the "From: " line of the message, and commit
> author date is taken from the "Date: " line of the message.')
>
> Thank you!
> Laszlo
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