git rebase -r --root --exec \
'git commit --amend --no-edit --author="your-name <your-email>"git: commit identity
issue
usually, i don’t use graphical user interface when working w/ git repos, and all of my work is happening in terminal. the same w/ github web page, i rarely visit it. one day, i decided to do so, to see how things are going there, and discovered that on my github landing page there was no any single commit that i had been doing through time. actually, when going into the repos, all of the commits were listed, but…
background
git
googling this issue, i’ve found that git tracks commits based on their author and committer emails.
the question is who is the author and who is the committer?
an author is one who creates a patch file. patch file is, as i get it, basically, a list of files and changes that will be included in next commit.
a committer is one who makes a patch file one step further into a commit.
the same w/ books. a writer is an author of a book. but a book can have completely different publisher.
then i remembered, that i’ve changed my github email address last month, and not having this change reproduced in my local config file
github
github hosting service treats commit as yours if its [commit’s] author email is same w/ your github account email. no matter who the committer was, if it has author email matched w/ you github account email then you’re the author and the commit will be displayed on your github landing page.
thus, when i’ve changed my github email address, i lost ownership of all of my past commits at once.
workflow
check git configurations
first of all, once you are in your git repo, it is good to check user name and email w/ the following cmds:
-
git config --<global | local> --list | grep user
i strongly recommend you to set git user name and email on you machine before you start any work w/ the repo, cause this will get you rid of many troubles hereafter. do this w/ the following:
-
git config --<global | local> user.name "<your-name>" -
git config --<global | local> user.name "<your-email>"
starting from here, your future commits will have both author email and commit email the same.
check commit’s author and committer
already having commits in your repo, you can check who is the author and the committer w/:
git cat-file -p <commit>
again, for github to treat the commit as yours, author email has to match w/ github account email.
changing author email
in my case, i wanted to change commits' author name. some googling, and i’ve done this w/ the following:
this introduces completely new commits w/ new sha-hashes. in fact, only your
account email will be changed. in order for commit email to be changed, you
have to make sure that you’ve configured --<global | local> name and
email address before executing this command.
recommended book: git - oreilly