Proposed revised format for JDK commit messages

[joe darcy]

On 9/17/2018 11:02 AM, Erik Helin wrote:
> On 09/17/2018 06:29 PM, Erik Helin wrote:
>> How about changing whats get recorded for a sponsored commit? We 
>> could let the author be recorded in the author field and then have a 
>> "Sponsored-by" line? This way we could also encode the sponshorship 
>> for commits from a person with role "Author" (the "Author" would of 
>> course be the author and we would add an "Sponsored-by" line for the 
>> sponsor).
>
> ...and, as usual when not thinking about a problem for a while, a 
> third idea popped up :)
>
> We could utilize the fact that git has two different fields in a 
> commit for recording different kinds of authorship:
> - committer
>   The person who applied, ev. merged and then pushed the patch
> - author
>   The person who created the patch
>
> Git's notion of committer is fairly close to our concept of sponsor (a 
> sponsor has a bit more responsibility than just committing and pushing 
> the patch). So another suggestion would therefore be to utilize the 
> committer field for recording the sponsor.
>
> For "regular" pushes from a person with role "Committer" or above, the 
> committer field and the author field would be the same (assuming the 
> person with "Committer" status also wrote the patch).
>
> So, two suggestions for encoding sponsorship while still letting 
> author mean author:
> - add a "Sponsored-by" line
> - use the committer field for recording the sponsor
>
>

Right; there are several notions we want to capture:

* The set of people who wrote and reviewed the changeset in question.

* The person(s) responsible for a fix going into a particular line of 
development/release

In the common case the sole author is the person deciding the fix should 
go into a release by virtue of being the person who pushes the 
changeset. In certain cases, the existing fields don't model what what 
is going on. For example, a changeset in the mainline release is written 
by an non-author and thus has a sponsor as author and a contributed-by 
line. If such a change is backported to an update release, there isn't a 
good way to record who is doing the backport.

I think using the existing git field as suggested is worth further 
consideration.

-Joe