Re: PG 19 release notes and authors

On Sat, Apr 4, 2026 at 7:27 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> This is the same argument we have had for ages, accuracy vs
> encouragement.

If that is the new policy, my policy will be to never use the
Co-authored-by tag, except perhaps for my own name. If I don't think
someone deserves authorship credit, then I just won't list them as an
author in the commit message.

Given how the tag is apparently being interpreted, the only scenario
where it still seems useful to me personally is one where I make
substantial revisions to a patch but, for whatever reason,
specifically do not think I deserve a full authorship credit. Which,
to be fair, doesn't seem too implausible. The need for substantial
revisions isn't an inherently good indicator of whether the original
patch author deserves authorship credit in the release notes.
Performing such revisions probably shouldn't be automatic grounds for
committers to receive a release notes credit.

In such a scenario, where I list myself using the Co-authored-by tag,
the tag is useful because it avoids a weird mixed signal. It would be
strange not to acknowledge that I technically wrote much of the code
in the committed patch; what if my code had a bug that the original
code didn't? At the same time, the tag avoids giving me more credit
than I deserve, which is what I'd want to happen when I choose to use
the tag (I'd want that out of a sense of fairness).

What I'm saying here boils down to this: I don't think it's sensible
to expect the use of a specific tag variant (or even the order in
which author names appear) to convey much useful information. I really
hope nobody reads too much into my choices in this area.

--
Peter Geoghegan