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How I got robbed of my first kernel contribution
(ariel-miculas.github.io)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Programming
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I submitted a pull request to Vim and the maintainer thanked me, tweaked it, and my name is not in the commit history because of it. I use to be bitter about it, if only a little. So I know how you feel but I put significantly less time into mine so the magnitude of the feeling is much smaller for me. My name is still there in the GitHub pull request though. Just like your name is still in the commit itself and in the mailing list. Try not to fret too much about the specifics of your name being in the author field. It's really just a technical detail.
It sucks but it is what it is. I don't think treating this like you were slighted is appropriate.
To be fair, wasn't the vim codebase entirely committed by a single person? He did that with everyone and, while I don't agree with that at all, it reads less like elitism / stolen credit than this particular story.
I may be wrong about that, so feel free to correct me ๐ either way, people should be credited for the work they do! and preferably not in the footnotes of a commit authored by someone else that didn't fix the bug
No, you're correct, it definitely was all (or mostly) committed by Bram. That's part of why I was saying it didn't feel as bad but I didn't think it was relevant to mention. But yes, you're definitely correct.
Git has different fields for author and committer - and modifying a commit should leave the author field intact, and just change the committer field. It is possible that github does something weird (I'm usually not doing much in their web UI) - but coming from working with git directly I'd expect you to be present in the author field.
I didn't write the content of that commit. Author and committer being different is for things like rebasing commits written by other people.
You mentioned a pull request, and that it got edited - which in my workflow is pulling the commit and amending it.
Okay, I probably misspoke about the technicalities. I opened a pull request, then they made a new commit and closed the PR (like it was an issue) and didn't touch the commit. Hope that makes sense now.