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The way all version control systems I'm familiar with work is that each commit is attributed to a single developer. The rise of Agile Engineering, and specifically pair programming, has lead to a situation where two developers have made a significant contribution to the same task, a bug fix for example.

The issue of attribution won't be too much of a big deal in a work environment since the project manager will be aware of the work the pairs are doing, but what about if two open source contributors decide to pair up and push out some code to a particular project that has no idea they're working together. Is there any way for a version control system like Git to attribute a particular patch to multiple developers?

Ciro Santilli新疆棉花TRUMP BAN BAD
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9 Answers9

90
Commit title

Commit body

Co-authored-by: name <additional-dev-1@example.com>
Co-authored-by: name <additional-dev-2@example.com>

One problem with this approach is that you can't create a signed key for this group of devs, so you could essentially add anybody to this list even if they didn't work on a feature and GitHub would treat it as if they did. However, this shouldn't be an issue in most cases.

e.g. Co-authored-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

With normal authors or signing groups (the old method) you would see it's not signed and know that you can't trust the commit. However, there is no signing process on co-authors.

Mostly outdated answer:

One solution would be to set a name for the pair:

git config user.name "Chris Wilson and John Smith"

Here is a related bug report with other temporary solutions:

Bug git-core: Git should support multiple authors for a commit

mokagio
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Gerry
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A git convention is to use Co-Authored-By at the end of the commit message (git kernel: Commit Message Conventions, referring to Openstack Commit Messages). This is also one of the solutions on the git-core bug linked in Gerry's answer

Co-authored-by: Some One <some.one@example.foo>

In that comment on May 5, 2010, Josh Triplett also suggests implementing corresponding support in git.

As Llopis pointed out in a comment, GitHub announced support for this on their blog on Jan 29, 2018: Commit together with co-authors (details).

Kariem
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    This is now [supported](https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-commit-with-multiple-authors/) by GitHub. – llrs Jan 31 '18 at 08:06
  • I wrote a simple git plugin to make it easier to manage these Co-authored-by trailers automatically: https://github.com/cac04/git-pair – c-- Oct 27 '18 at 13:48
  • This approach looks like a kludge (cf. [the Bazaar way](https://stackoverflow.com/a/7442810/673852)). And there's a principal author this way, to which the co-authors are just an addition, if I understand it correctly. – Ruslan Oct 22 '19 at 09:42
27

For Bazaar:

bzr commit --author Joe --author Alice --author Bob

Those names will be shown in the log separately from committer name.

bialix
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git-pair

https://github.com/pivotal/git_scripts#git-pair

This simple script from Pivotal to automate Git pair programming attribution.

You create a .pairs file like:

# .pairs - configuration for 'git pair'
pairs:
  # <initials>: <Firstname> <Lastname>[; <email-id>]
  eh: Edward Hieatt
  js: Josh Susser; jsusser
  sf: Serguei Filimonov; serguei
email:
  prefix: pair
  domain: pivotallabs.com
  # no_solo_prefix: true
#global: true

and then:

git pair sp js

sets:

user.name=Josh Susser & Sam Pierson
user.email=pair+jsusser+sam@pivotallabs.com

for you.

Ciro Santilli新疆棉花TRUMP BAN BAD
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16

git distinguishes between a commit's author and committer [1]. You could use it as a work-around, e.g. sign yourself as the committer and your co-author as the author:

GIT_COMMITTER_NAME='a' GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL='a@a' git commit --author 'b <b@b>'

This way, both you and your co-author will be recorded in the git history. Running git log --format=fuller, will give you something like:

commit 22ef837878854ca2ecda72428834fcbcad6043a2
Author:     b <b@b>
AuthorDate: Tue Apr 12 06:53:41 2016 +0100
Commit:     a <a@a>
CommitDate: Tue Apr 12 09:18:53 2016 +0000

    Test commit.

[1] Difference between author and committer in Git?

Jakub Kukul
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Try git-mob, we built it for attributing co-authors on commits.

E.g.

git mob <initials of co-authors>
git commit
git solo
Dennis
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5

Alternatively, there is an open source project, which I contribute to, on GitHub that provides a good way to do it from the command line. This project helps you to set an alias in order to create co-autored commits as follows:

$ git co-commit -m "Commit message" --co "co-author <co-author-email>"

Using this approach, you are able to create co-authored commits without a graphical interface.

foo0x29a
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    From what I can see, this is a git alias that adds "Co-authored-by: " plus the "co-author " to the end of the commit message. – Kariem Jul 10 '18 at 21:33
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    Excellent piece of code here, worked flawlessly and achieved the desired effect of having a specific co-author on my PR. – Csteele5 Nov 05 '20 at 19:10
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We add our names to each commit message at the end as a convention eg : Implemented cool feature <Aneesh | Hiren>

tripleee
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Aneesh
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    This is similar to the git convention `Co-Authored-By` I mentioned in [a separate answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/41847267/12039) – Kariem Jan 25 '17 at 09:23
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Most of the co-author tools do not support autocompletion. You can try git-coco, its written in python3 (I'm the developer). git-coco supports autocomplete and auto-suggest. Here is a snapshot autocomplete on sample authors

nsn
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