Re: PG 19 release notes and authors

> On 6 Apr 2026, at 15:57, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:

> 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@eisentraut.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@gmail.com>
>     Reviewed-by: Pavel Seleznev <pavel.seleznev@gmail.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.

My online checksums commit use a similar pattern, which is how I had
interpreted our use of it.  It lists myself and Magnus as authors with Tomas
Vondra as co-auhor since he provided substantial changes to the patch.

A missing Author tag should IMO always mean that the committer is the author.

>> do think we have enough structured data that if we felt our attribution efforts
>> were insufficient there are more things we could do.  I’m not sure this is the
>> most valuable way to expose this data but it’s a way, we likely don’t do enough
>> promotion even with it, and it seems low maintenance.  But maybe there is a
>> cost/benefit discussion to be had here.
> 
> I guess that is my question.  I don't think the author names have the
> same practical value now that we have commit links, but if people think
> it still has _sufficient_ value, we should keep it --- that was my
> question.

I know from talking to several contributors that seeing their name next to the
feature in the release notes is a huge motivator.

--
Daniel Gustafsson