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Git Author != Committer

It may be quite confusing, but in git ‘commit author’ and ‘committer’ are separate beasts.

Let’s imagine you have a remote Gerrit repo and you noticed your last commit has author’s email configured as foo@internal.com:

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commit af434be3126cfbcaf450b04137d4d09cd87f8a47
Author: Name Surname <foo@internal.com>
Date:   Sat Dec 10 20:34:30 2016 -0800

    Add more bewbs

    Change-Id: Idca25cc30ac8ee311ac93a962e1c2f3d3e9a3416

Gerrit expects it to be foo@company.com. So an attempt to push change request to the community repo results in error

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remote: ERROR:  In commit af434be3126cfbcaf450b04137d4d09cd87f8a47
remote: ERROR:  committer email address foo@internal.com
remote: ERROR:  does not match your user account.
remote: ERROR:
remote: ERROR:  The following addresses are currently registered:
remote: ERROR:    foo@company.com

Ok, we can amend the commit and reset the author

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git commit --amend --no-edit --author 'Name Surname <foo@company.com>'

git log shows author’s email is correct now:

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commit c82db34717123c9e3c31c3a330dd81059880afac
Author: Name Surname <foo@company.com>
Date:   Sat Dec 10 20:34:30 2016 -0800

    Add more bewbs

    Change-Id: Idca25cc30ac8ee311ac93a962e1c2f3d3e9a3416

but does push works now? Nope!

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remote: ERROR:  In commit c82db34717123c9e3c31c3a330dd81059880afac
remote: ERROR:  committer email address foo@internal.com
remote: ERROR:  does not match your user account.
remote: ERROR:
remote: ERROR:  The following addresses are currently registered:
remote: ERROR:    foo@company.com

what the heck? The answer is quite simple – we didn’t reset committer’s email along with author’s one. Let’s check git log with ‘fuller’ option supplied.

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git log --format=fuller

commit c82db34717123c9e3c31c3a330dd81059880afac
Author:     Name Surname <foo@company.com>
AuthorDate: Sat Dec 10 20:34:30 2016 -0800
Commit:     Name Surname <foo@internal.com>
CommitDate: Sat Dec 10 20:35:24 2016 -0800

    Add more bewbs

    Change-Id: Idca25cc30ac8ee311ac93a962e1c2f3d3e9a3416

this is the reason. You want to export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL variable

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export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL=foo@company.com

and, potentially, GIT_COMMITTER_NAME prior to the rebase so committer information is being set correctly.

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