75 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
75 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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title: Give credit where credit's due
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date: 2023-04-15 09:17 -0400
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---
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I love pair programming. It is a great way to improve solutions, share context,
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and continuously review code. But the passenger in a pairing session often ends
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up being the unsung hero, not showing up in the commit history for their
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invaluable contributions because they were not typing on the keyboard.
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Commit logs are obviously not the authority on an individual's contributions to
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a codebase, but I still like to give credit where credit is due. Fortunately,
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using git's [trailers][1], Github allows you to [commit together][2]. Including
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a `Co-authored-by:` citation with your pairing partner's name and email will
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properly attribute them in Github's commit log.
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I have used this to share credit for several years, but it is a bit painful.
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Making sure to type your partner's name and email is a hassle. Any typo will
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not credit appropriately and become permanantly engraved in the history of your
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repository when you merge it to master!
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So avoid the typos!
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First, I created a simple git alias that will allow me to easily modify a commit
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to add a trailer. In your global `.gitconfig` file, add
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```
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[alias]
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add-trailer = commit --no-edit --amend --trailer
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```
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This can be used as part of a two step process:
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1. Make your commit as you normally would
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1. Use the alias to add a trailer
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- `git add-trailer "Co-authored-by: Partner <a@example.com>"`
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We can still have typos though. But if our pairing partner has worked on this
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repository in the past, we can find their information in the git log. This is
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still painful to do manually. [Fzf][3] can help us here though. We can pass our
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log information into fzf and then pass our selection on to our newly created git
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alias:
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```
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git log --pretty="%an <%ae>" \
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| sort -u \
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| fzf \
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| xargs -I "{}" git add-trailer "Co-authored-by: {}"
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```
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Breaking this down:
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- `git log --pretty="%an <%ae>"`
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- List the author of every commit in our repositry and format it appropriately
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for attribution
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- `sort -u`
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- Make the list sorted and unique
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- `fzf`
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- Prompt us to make a selection from the list
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- `xargs -I "{}" git add-trailer "Co-authored-by: {}"`
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- Take the result from our prompt and pass it into our new git alias
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And when everything is in place, attribution is a breeze!
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And in the spirit of attribution, thanks to last week's pairing partner:
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Encouraged-by: nichol alexander \<nichol.alexander@gmail.com>
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[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-interpret-trailers
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[2]: https://github.blog/2018-01-29-commit-together-with-co-authors/
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[3]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
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