Thoughts on git commit mail

[Ed Maste]

On Thu, 31 Dec 2020 at 17:14, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> The mix of fields for name and date is a bit odd though.  Perhaps another
> alternative might be to elide the Author fields if the Author == Committer?
> That would keep a lean format when when the individuals are the same.
> For that suggestion, I think you would always show the two Commit fields
> ("Committer" and "CommitDate") and only show "Author" and "AuthorDate"
> if Author != Committer?

I discussed this a bit with John on IRC, but for the benefit of the list:

We expect Author == Committer will be common, and the commit date is
probably the more interesting date. In addition, committer will always
be someone at FreeBSD.org, so what about if we take John's suggestion for
Date, and use the author name, appending (via /committer/) if it's not
the author?

Thus, for the example above:

Author: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org> (via rlibby)
Date: 2020-12-31 19:56:33 +0000

This is nice and concise while conveying all useful information, IMO.
This would work identically for MFCs of commits made by other
committers, as well as committing changes submitted by 3rd parties.