Commit author/co-author distinction

[cloudhead]

When a commit is merged by a different person than the author, this information is usually preserved in the commit body. Eg. see this commit:

commit 3cf62b6aa73322152209d195e4be0390e18dd8a3
Author: Merle Breitkreuz <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Apr 7 13:17:29 2020 +0200

    feat: implement transaction center and detail view (#242)

    Co-authored-by: Alexander Simmerl <[email protected]>

We would like to present this information in the UI, in this case the co-author, in a similar way that GitHub does, and so would need surf to provide it in some way or form.

[xla]

AFAIK surf just reexports git2::Commit which carries the author and committer signature. Is that enough for the use-case?

[cloudhead]

Oh interesting, that may be enough then, will have a look.

[cloudhead]

Ok, I've managed to get committer information, however it's not what I expected, ie. it's not the co-author, but the signer. Take the above commit for example: if we look at the signature we get:

commit 3cf62b6aa73322152209d195e4be0390e18dd8a3
gpg: Signature made Tue 07 Apr 2020 01:17:29 PM CEST
gpg:                using RSA key 4AEE18F83AFDEB23
gpg: Good signature from "GitHub (web-flow commit signing) <[email protected]>" [unknown]
Primary key fingerprint: 5DE3 E050 9C47 EA3C F04A  42D3 4AEE 18F8 3AFD EB23
Author: Merle Breitkreuz <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Apr 7 13:17:29 2020 +0200

    feat: implement transaction center and detail view (#242)

    Co-authored-by: Alexander Simmerl <[email protected]>

The committer here is actually "GitHub", as provided by libgit/surf. I think for now this is good enough, but perhaps this is something we can look into in the next iteration, as ideally we would be a bit smarter about it.

[kim]

The `Co-authored-by` is something GH started to do at some point when you press the green button, but the contributor doesn’t have push access to the repo (I think). I mistakenly took this for a DCO in a different context. (Aside: It’s actually outrageous to have GH do these things on users’ behalf. Otoh, this is exactly the use case for the Substrate “Secret Store”)