Owner, Author and Commiter on Gerrit

[Eric Tsai]

Take this for example: https://review.source.android.com/Gerrit#change,9539
The author of patch set 1 is Steinar H. Gunderson, but the Comitter is
Arve Hjønnevåg.
Does this mean that Arve is the person who clicked the "Submit Patch
Set 1" button?

I think Steinar create the change with Patch Set 1, so he should be
the owner of the change.
Why is the change owner Arve instead of Steinar?

[Shawn Pearce]

Change Owner:  The user who ran "repo upload" to send the change to Gerrit.

Patch Set Author:  The user listed in the Git commit's "author" line.

Patch Set Committer:  The user listed in the Git commit's "committer" line.

It can be possible for Author != Committer when a change is cherry-picked.  E.g. in this case you are describing, Arve cherry-picked the change from some other location, but is reasonably certain Steinar H. Gunderson actually wrote that code, hence Steinar is listed as the author.

In this case, Arve also did the upload to Gerrit, so he was the change owner.

When Author != Committer, Gerrit tries to email the author and make sure the change shows up in their dashboard, so the author knows that Arve has created this change on his/her behalf.


For another example, look at https://review.source.android.com/9694 that I just cherry-picked today.  Compare Patch Set 1 and Patch Set 2 in the same change.  Gert created this change when he uploaded it, but I cherry-picked it to correct the author line to match Gert's name/email.