Skip to content

Nothing checks the exported branch's commit author identity before handoff #57

Description

@wolfgang-aura

Run 20260903T194455Z-140c59 against pmorissette/ffn was exported and published with the operator's personal email address as the commit author. It was a local git config mistake, discovered only after the pull request was open, and fixing it required asking the maintainer to rewrite the author and force-push a green branch (he did, promptly — but that is a cost a maintainer should never have to pay for a harness-detectable mistake).

What happened, in order:

  1. The run finished and export-patch produced the patch package. Nothing in it looks at commit authorship.
  2. The branch was pushed with the personal email as author of the commit.
  3. The pull request was filed. The problem surfaced while writing the submission follow-up, by reading the commit on GitHub.
  4. The operator asked the maintainer to rewrite the author before merge. The rewrite landed as 7cc05ab and the personal email never entered upstream history — but only because the maintainer cooperated and the branch was worth the force-push.

prepare-submission already reads the diff for hygiene findings a maintainer would see first. Author identity is exactly that class of problem: it says something about the submission, not the code, and a maintainer sees it immediately. The gate that catches it should live there, next to the whitespace checks:

  • Record the author name and email of every commit the run would publish.
  • Refuse, or record as a finding, when an author email is not the one the operator has designated for public work. Which address that is — the account's noreply address, a project alias — is the operator's to configure; the harness's job is to compare against something instead of publishing whatever the local git config happens to hold.
  • The same check applies to the committer field, and to any co-author trailer in the message.

Evidence: ffn #330 carried the commit as fa60886 before the rewrite; what merged is 7cc05ab with the author wolfgang-aura <169568318+wolfgang-aura@users.noreply.github.com>. The full path is recorded in docs/runs/0009-ffn-330-first-merge.md.

Activity

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions