Re: Please check open Merge Requests before your next upload
On Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 01:34:16PM -0700, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
On August 19th the maintainer closed the MR. He thanked the submitter
for it but decided that merging or was too much effort after he did
other changes on the main branch, so he just went ahead and did the
exact same change himself to save time/effort for himself.
Did he credit the MR submitter in the commit message and/or in the
package's changelog? If he did that, I find that a perfectly fine
process in the context of Debian. See a patch, take it, credit the
author.
End result is that this new contributor did not get his name in the
git commit log,
If the package maintainer credited him in the commit text, his name is
in the git commit log. It never occurred to me that it might be
important for anybody to have their name in the "Author:" field of a
commit in a random git history.
Not mentioning the submitter in the commit message would be an omission
on the package maintainer's side. I consider it polite to do so when I
take a patch from somewhere.
his Salsa profile does not show that he has any
successfully merged MRs (even thought he change was fully correct and
identical to what the maintainer did),
It never occurred to me that this would be of any importance for
anybody.
the contributor won't find his
name in the changelog
That would have been an omission on the package maintainer's side. I
consider it polite to mention the submitter of a patch in the changelog.
I always do that when a patch is from a person that I can clearly
identify, if it's an obvious or silly pseudonym I sometimes don't
mention that, those people obviously dont want to be recognized.
nor get anything accumulated at
https://contributors.debian.org/contributor/<name>.
I was neither aware that this page exists nor did it occur to me that
being mentioned there was of any importance to anyone. Do we pull names
from Changelogs to that web site?
So all the effort the submitter did - and also me as mentor - was in
vain.
I was not aware that we contribute to Debian to have our names mentioned
in media. I had the impression that our common goal is to produce
quality software. Barring impoliteness of this very maintainer (should
have have not mentioned the patch submitter at least in the
debian/changelog) - having my code in Debian and my name mentioned in
the package's changelog and in a git commit message has always been
enough for me to be satisfied and motivated.
This is not the end of the world, but I wanted to share it as an
anecdote of the new contributor experience.
As a package maintainer, I am not very fond of the idea of having to
jump through hoops just to make sure that the bug submitter is mentioned
everywhere possible and gets the proper statistics, badges, chocolates
and hugs. If that means more work for me, I'll probably take the short
and easy way for me while still being polite according to my time
budget.
If think giving feedback and letting the submitter finalize the thing
will help them feel more ownership, but if you do decide to just
quickly do it yourself, you can actually edit the Merge Requests on
Salsa (and Pull Requests on GitHub). The official documentation is at
https://salsa.debian.org/help/topics/git/forks.md#push-to-a-fork-as-an-upstream-member
but it is a bit hard to understand without an example. I will try to
write a post about this with Debian examples in my blog soon.
When I push to a fork of my project, this is about twice the work than
just doing a trivial change in my own project. And, again, I find it
more hostile to git push --force to an active branch on a foreign git
repo owned by a stranger than just taking the trivial patch and giving
proper credit in the commit message.
Greetings
Marc
--
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Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header
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