Friday, February 2, 2018

Pair programming with git

Git is great. It took the crown of version control systems in just a few years. Baked into the git model is that each commit has a committer and one author. Ofen this is the same person. What if there is more than one author for a commit? This is the case with pair programming or with mob programming or with any other way of collaboration where code is produced by more than one person. I talked about this at the git-merge conference last year. There are some workarounds but there is no native support in git yet.

It seems that the predominant convention to express multi-authorship in git commits is to add a Co-authored-by entry in the commit message as a so-called trailer. This adds more flexibility than trying to tweak the author and committer fields and is quite widely accepted, especially by the git community.

I'm happy that GitHub added support for the Co-authored-by convention now. It makes multi-authorship more visible. That's a good thing.

I did some work on adding native support for multiple authors in git. The direct approach of allowing more than one author field might be too intrusive due to the many possible side effects. But the Co-authored-by trailer is still a good solution. I have an unfinished patch to add some native support for that in git. It does need some more work, though.

Contributing to git is an interesting experience. The git mailing list is the central place. The contribution workflow is well-documented. It's good that Junio as maintainer has spelled out how he reviews patches and what that means for contributors. And it's definitely fun to work on a self-contained C project.

I'm looking forward to more multi-author support in git and GitHub. Pair-programming is a great model, and properly reflecting in the commit logs what happened when the code was written is the right thing to do.

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