Correcting authors

[joerg.s...@gmx.de]

Hi,

is there any way to correct author names? If we fix an author's name in Git and force the push, the Git repo on the server is silently restored by SubGit to its previous state and if we correct it in Subversion, the change is simply ignored by SubGit.

Background: We are a small team of 6 developers and developing a platform independent software package. Some devs use VMs to test and correct things, but have failed to setup their Git client properly, so they have committed stuff with wrong author names (despite the same email address). Since these names have been transferred even to Subversion, we assume they count separately for the number of authors in SubGit.

Can we ask SubGit about its current number of users? What happens if the number exceeds 10? The documentation of SubGit does not give details here.

Regards,
Jörg

[Dmitry Pavlenko]

Hello Jorg,
It's pretty easy to change the author on the SVN side:

  svn propset --revprop -rREV svn:author 'newAuthor' SVN_URL

But this change has no effect on Git side and on overall license users counting, as we count Git
authors.

But it's hard to change author in Git because that would mean different SHA-1. In this case one can

1. Fix the author in SVN.
2. Discard current Git repository.
3. Install SubGit from scratch to a new directory or rebuild existing
one with:

  $ subgit install --rebuild path/to/git/repository

Note that SHA-1 hashes will be different and the repository will need to be re-cloned.


What about license: SubGit counts Git committers for the last year (and those wrong committers,
too). You can always check what Git committers are there with

  $ subgit register --print-committers path/to/git/repository

When the number of committers is exceeded, SubGit starts showing warnings and after 28 days stops
working.

See this article for details: https://blog.subgit.com/subgit-license-keys/

In cases like yours if our users can't fix the problem themselves with --rebuild, we usually issue a
new key, e.g. for 11 users instead of 10.

I hope, this information helps.

--

Dmitry Pavlenko,

TMate Software,

http://subgit.com/ - git-svn bridge

[joerg.s...@gmx.de]

Hi Dmitry,

thanks for your info. In the meanwhile I found also the current license status in the daemon.log: 10 of 10.

I feared that rebuilding the repository is the only way to get rid of the wrong authors. The repo is quite big (4GB) ... is it possible to rebuild only parts of it? What I have in mind:

1. Remove the post-trigger in the GIT-Server for SubGit
2. Drop the changes of the last 12 months in all branches in the Git-Repo
   
3. Fix authors in Subversion
4. Activate post-trigger again

Will SubGit synchronize the missing stuff again?

Cheers,

Jörg