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One of the features I recently discovered in Bazaar is the --author option for “bzr commit“.  This lets you make commits to a Bazaar branch on behalf of another person.  When used, the new revision credits two people: you as the committer and the other person as the author.

While Bazaar does make it easy for non-core contributors to send changes in a form that correctly attributes them (e.g. by publishing a branch or sending a bundle), I doubt we’ll ever see the end of pure patches.  Some cases include:

• Patches based on a tarball release.   In these cases the contributor likely hasn’t even used the VCS.
• People send simple diffs from e.g. “bzr diff” since that is sometimes the easiest solution (or what they do by default due to having transferred their knowledge from another VCS).
• Some people use a VCS bridge so they can work with their favourite VCS.  They might not be able to provide their changes as Bazaar commits due to this.

The --author option lets you commit these changes in a way that credits the contributor for their work.  The author of the change will then be displayed in “bzr annotate” output and credited along with the you in the “bzr log” output.

The feature is also used by a number of plugins such as bzr-rebase: if you replay or rebase someone else’s changes, the new revisions will creit you as the committer and the original committer as the author.