~adeodato/ blog/ Attribution in distributed VCS is cool

Attribution in distributed VCS is cool

Among the benefits that distributed version control systems have brought us, I would like to mention a very small one, that may often go unnoticed, but that I think it’s actually pretty cool: attribution. With DVCS, it’s now normal to have each change attributed at VCS level to the person which made the change.

For this, normally the author has to publish a branch, or maybe send an “enriched patch” or bundle that contains meta-data, or revision information. If they send a plain diff, though, the VCS may still offer a way to credit them, by putting their name in the “author” field. For both Git and Bazaar, this is done with the --author option for commit.