Re: First draft of PG 19 release notes

On Wed, Apr 15, 2026 at 10:21:34AM -0700, Jacob Champion wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2026 at 9:57 AM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> > I have used your text above. FYI, the commit message only has this for
> > author:
> >
> > Co-authored-by: Ashutosh Bapat <ashutosh(dot)bapat(dot)oss(at)gmail(dot)com>
>
> The pattern of "a missing Author means the committer is the primary
> author" was discussed at [1]; you asked if Co-authored-by was used
> that way, and the answer was "yes". I use it, too.

Well, I am guessing you didn't read this thread fully:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/adElLtegJxi6Yecv%40momjian.us

which opened with the question:

In the PG 19 commits, I am seeing several commits with Author
and Co-authored-by tags. FYI, I think we agreed that only the
Author names are mentioned as the authors in the release notes.

and I was told that authors and "Co-authored-by" should be listed; they
are effectively the same, except that github recognizes
"Co-authored-by".

I _thought_ the plan from January 2025 until March 2026 was:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Commit_Message_Guidance
Author:
Co-authored-by:
Used to indicate the patch authors. "Co-authored-by:" is used by
committers when they want to give full credit to the named individuals,
but also indicate that they made significant changes.

This was specifically for "Co-authored-by:" == committer, but the text
was not clear enough. However, that doesn't match your usage where a
missing "Author" is considered to be the committer.

At [1], https://postgr.es/m/adO73c_EJKi05smk, I said:

Wow, I never thought that was a valid pattern, but I see a few PG 19
commit messages using that, e.g.:


Author: Peter Eisentraut <peter(at)eisentraut(dot)org>
2025-08-12 [5f19d13df] libpq: Set LDAP protocol version 3

libpq: Set LDAP protocol version 3

Some LDAP servers reject the default version 2 protocol. So set
version 3 before starting the connection. This matches how the
backend LDAP code has worked all along.

Co-authored-by: Andrew Jackson <andrewjackson947(at)gmail(dot)com>
Reviewed-by: Pavel Seleznev <pavel(dot)seleznev(at)gmail(dot)com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAKK5BkHixcivSCA9pfd_eUp7wkLRhvQ6OtGLAYrWC%3Dk7E76LDQ%40mail.gmail.com


Is that what people are using? A missing Author, and co-authors means
the committer is the author? Right? Shouldn't we document this? That
does give a unique use for Co-authored-by.

However, later emails said:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CA%2BTgmob_tz0%2BT1CcyTFwgQVThsoezY2fKib%3Dr%2BukAvVBXwM1gg%40mail.gmail.com
This whole discussion is crazy to me. Every Author and Co-Author
should be listed in the release notes. If there is no author or
co-author named in the commit message, then the committer should be
listed as the sole author; otherwise, the exact list of authors and
co-authors that the committer chose to include in the commit message
should be credited.

and there are more emails saying that, so that is the rule I used, and
documented on the wiki is:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Commit_Message_Guidance
Used to indicate the patch authors. If no "Author" or
"Co-authored-by" is listed, the committer is assumed to be
the author.

What I also said in the thread was:

What I don't want to do is to re-litigate this again, and usually
if we ignore what people said in the past, they will show up at
some later time to try to undo what we are doing now.

I created the PG 19 release notes with Author == "Co-authored-by:", so
if committers have not done that for PG 19, I need them to either inform
me of the rules they used, supply a release note patch, or change the
release notes themselves. And hopefully use agreed-upon rules in the
future, whatever we decide those are.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

Do not let urgent matters crowd out time for investment in the future.