It's common practice to have the committer not match the author (especially in environments where only patches/diffs are sent). I can't imagine the git project having any issue with that, given that the author field stays retained (ignoring this bug ofc.).
I tried to do some more research on this. Unfortunately the search combination
> rewrite commit github verified
is so insanely SEO-poisoned by (1) StackOverflow questions about how to rewrite commits and (2) GitHub’s docs about regular (built-in Git commit verification) commit verification.
But I thought about it some more. And I guess them hijacking the committer on pull request merges is not that insanely bothersome. It’s their platform after all.
Just yet another reason to not interact with forges in a way that affects Git itself.
But another thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes my committer becomes the stupid initial (legacy) email I used to sign up there. Why in the hell? My current email is already registered there. But I tested this now and at least I got the option to merge as one of my addresses. So I guess it was fixed?
> It's common practice to have the committer not match the author
When the committer and author are different people. And apparently when GitHub tries to insert itself as a pseudo-person.
I expected that my own actions would be tied to my own identity on GitHub. Not for them to shoehorn GitHub Verified™ into commit objects that I create through clickity-clacking around their UI. But it is after all their UI and they can poison commits however they like since they create it (i.e. I didn’t create it and send it to them; then I would have noticed if they tried to rewrite it). So shame on me.
> especially in environments where only patches/diffs are sent
Clearly doesn’t apply here.
> I can't imagine the git project having any issue with that, given that the author field stays retained (ignoring this bug ofc.).
Given that they don’t use GitHub for anything directly related to Git (PRs and such) and that they have their own way of indicating code provenance: No, I guess they have no reason to care. (Other than in spirit.)
But it matters in general (in spirit) that if I pick up some patch by Jack Cooper and apply it then the committer is me. Not outlook.com. Or whatever program did it for me.
The commit object has a few metadata fields. I’ve never seen anyone say, “Oh yeah sure, just use that field for whatever it’s not like it matters anyway”.
