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Comment by afhof | Hacker News Reader

I know its a limited view of reality, but I was debugging ffserver, found the bug and mentioned it on FFmpeg's IRC channel. Michael added my own one-liner change and listed me as the author for the git commit. This is a GREAT feeling for a newcomer to a project and it makes me want to keep helping with FFmpeg.

I agree with the author of this article in that FFmpeg will eventually win out, just for little things like this.

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That's true. I'm always annoyed when I send a patch for a project, it's integrated and that's it. No thanks. No mention of what I did. Just as if the author just found something and added it. Sometimes it's one liners (which may take hours to debug as usual), sometimes its a few thousand lines.

This behavior kills the will to contribute quickly.

That's what github is doing so nicely with pull-requests: you maintain authorship of your fixes (it's even cryptographically secured,) and the entire process is visible and documented on the project's source home page.

That is not unique to github pull requests, is it? I thought that was common to all of git, and the reason why git has separate "author" and "commiter" fields

yes, as they gotta pull from you for that. github just makes the process easier and it is more trouble not to attribute via github.

in both cases you can make a patch (=copy/paste) instead. and in the first case you often actually provide a patch because it might be easier or because they're using something else than a git or git-like vcs

yes and no, i mean, one can copy paste and change a lil and it works. That being said Github makes it harder not to do that (but some people are like that)

That being said too, not everyone uses github ;-)

I had a similar experience. I forked ffmpeg on github and fixed a few bugs that I was sure no one would care about but us. I figured I'd polish it up over a couple of weeks and send a patch for possible inclusion upstream. But the next morning I had an email waiting from Michael. He had found the fork, found my "experimental" branch, and emailed me to compliment me on the code, suggest a couple of changes, and ask if it would be cool to cherry-picked some of the commits into the mainline. I've been involved in a lot of opensource projects and have _never_ seen something that gracious. He obviously has taken whatever lessons he learned in the schism to heart. Between that and the fact that his code base is (more often than not, but not always) more stable and functional, I have little doubt which way things will flow eventually, perhaps after time has allowed more of the bad feelings to dissipate.

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