I'm not a programmer by profession, but I do some coding and have used github some. I've run across what I find to be a surprising situation. I'm very familiar with git.
There is a project which I found a (small) bug in that was affecting me. I spent an afternoon finding and fixing it. I forked the repository, commit the change, and issued a pull request. After seeing that it was closed as "Merged into development branch" I figured all was well.
I was browsing the repo today getting ready to remove my branch, and I can't find where the commit was merged into the maintainer's repo at all. After some time I realize it's been added as a commit, but the author is no longer me.
As far as I can tell the only way to do that would be to specifically use a rebase, amend, or other history rewrite to remove the original author.
This seems very wrong to me. At best it's confusing, at worst the author of this repo is taking credit for everyone's commits and then the history of the original contributor is lost. Again it's a small bug, I don't use this for my professional resume, it just seems dishonest.
Is this normal?
Should I say something about it?
Edit: The general feeling seems to be that I should go ask, so I'll do just that this morning.
As per the request below. I've checked and my code exists and was applied exactaly as I wrote it (including the comment). I verified that both the committer and author have been changed. There was one additional change also added at the same time as my changes. It's a single line, which would affect the patch as well as other code before it. IE the one line addition is not related to the bug I was fixing.
Update
It seems the answer was that the author maintains a development branch and does not want to merge from his master branch into it. He re-authored my commit to avoid a merge. I wasn't concerned with the original branch b/c git's plenty powerful to cherry-pick, rebase, and merge commits around as needed.
Is this typical on github?
Should I be contacting the maintainer of a project to ask which branch to apply patches to?
Best Answer
No they shouldn't, if avoidable. It's a problem that in my experience happens far too often. However I believe it is more to do with ignorance of how to use git correctly than somebody wanting to steal credit.
git rebase master. If there are conflicts they can either choose to fix the conflicts themselves (without changing author), or give you the chance to fix it.I think Github could and should look for this kind of accidental credit stealing and educate maintainers on best practices when appropriate.