Re: PG 19 release notes and authors

On Mon Apr 6, 2026 at 5:25 PM CEST, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Sorry, I meant to say that whether a name is "Author" or
> "Co-authored-by:" doesn't matter --- both appear in the release notes.

+1. Reading the discusssion it sounds like committers intended for
people in Co-authored-by to be listed in the release notes. And I don't
think there's consensus to change that for future commits.

> We can define what we want going forward and I we have different rules
> for PG 19.

Crazy idea: One option for what we could do going forward is use the
Author header field of the commit for the actual author, instead of
having that field always contain the same as the Committer header field.
Then we'd only put the committer details in the Committer header field
(unless the committer is also the author). So basically, not have an
Author footer field anymore. But only Co-authored-by in the footer if a
patch has more than one author.

Using Author in the header instead of the footer has the benefit of
actually being recognized by other tools like GitHub, just like
Co-authored-by is recognized in the footer. Right now, on GitHub a
non-committer author only shows up if they are listed as Co-authored-by,
not as Author. For instance, on this commit[1] the avatars and usernames
for both Heikki and Ashutosh are listed, because Ashutosh is listed in
Co-authored-by. But in this commit[2] where Bertrand is listed using the
Author footer tag, only Michael is shown in the GitHub UI.

[1]: https://github.com/postgres/postgres/commit/283e823f9dcb03d0be720928b261628af06d3fd4
[2]: https://github.com/postgres/postgres/commit/557a9f1e3e62894cc3302eda72d9df091d72f37b