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From: Jacob Champion <[email protected]>
To: John Naylor <[email protected]>
Cc: Bruce Momjian <[email protected]>
Cc: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
Cc: Andres Freund <[email protected]>
Cc: Álvaro Herrera <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Geoghegan <[email protected]>
Cc: Andrey Borodin <[email protected]>
Cc: PostgreSQL-development <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: PG 19 release notes and authors
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2026 08:43:00 -0700
Message-ID: <CAOYmi+kd0RzR6OW+sg4dbjynivQRN3EPA-68r3tiGyWu_a2w8A@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CANWCAZYtUp0y8A0Viz05sJQXsaFj8DqHLnAvY8-jsMj=YWoxXw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <[email protected]>
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	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<CANWCAZYtUp0y8A0Viz05sJQXsaFj8DqHLnAvY8-jsMj=YWoxXw@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Apr 6, 2026 at 7:47 AM John Naylor <[email protected]> wrote:
> That's not how I interpreted it at all, and after seeing commits with
> both "Author" and "Co-authored-by" I am equally confused as to how
> people are interpreting it.

In case it helps, here's what I had always assumed the meanings were
without consulting the wiki, with links to commits I've made so you
can roast my usage.

- "Author" overrides the default assumption, which is that the
committer was the author of the patch: https://postgr.es/c/a6483f5ac
- "Co-authored-by" lists co-authors, who share attribution in some
unspecified way. (GitHub adds a weak mechanical effect to this tag.)
https://postgr.es/c/993368113
- Some people list multiple Author: lines as an alternative to
Co-authored-by:, which never particularly bothered me.
- If attribution is more complex than that, people just say that in
the body of the message: https://postgr.es/c/c2bca7cc9

In particular, if I don't want official "credit" in the release notes
for minor changes I made to a patch during commit, I don't need to add
any tag at all. I just mention that I changed the patch, following a
style I've seen from Tom and others: https://postgr.es/c/e020a897e

> My take is that the co-author tag has backfired and made things less
> clear. If we are using it inconsistently, then it doesn't convey any
> useful information.

It conveys *attribution*, regardless of whether or not it's used
consistently for a mechanical purpose. I'm willing to bet that "I
coauthored this patch" has intuitive meaning to most people, inside
and outside this project.

I'm glad the momentum appears to be in favor of keeping that
attribution, because the idea that we'd retroactively discard it
seems... misguided, to me. This is going to be fuzzy in complex cases,
but it's okay to just write the complexity longhand when needed,
right?

--Jacob

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