Auto-populate Git Co-Authors with list of Live Share guests

[lostintangent]

Pair programming is one of the most common use cases for Live Share, and in order to make it easier to attribute developers you’ve paired with, we should explore how to auto-populate the host’s commit messages with the list of guests they collaborated with in a Live Share session (as appropriate).

Now that GitHub supports a defacto commit convention, we could simply detect the name and emails of developers who were in a Live Share session with you, and generate the respective “co-authored-by” trailers. Functionally, this would behave similarly to this extension, but wouldn’t require you to manually manage your list of collaborators, or explicitly append the trailer to your commit message (which you could easily forget to do!).

In general, this kind of experience could really help “close the loop” for pair programming, ensure folks on the team feel correctly attributed regardless who’s doing the commit, and keep your project history as semanticallly rich as possible.

From a scoping perspective, I believe that at least initially, we would focus on enhancing the in-tool SCM experience (e.g. the “Source Control” tab in VS Code), and recommend existing solutions for developers that use the Git CLI for performing their commits (e.g. git-mob, git-duet)

[lostintangent]

This has been addressed in the latest Live Share extension update.

[assafmo]

Hi, this only works for me on the first commit in a live share session. After the first commit, it doesn't auto-populate the commit message with the Co-authored-by lines. Any idea on how to solve this?

Product and Version: VSCode 1.45.0
OS Version: Linux
Live Share Extension Version: 1.0.2106

cc @toml01

[bartocc]

Just like @assafmo, I'd like to know if there is a way to have the Co-authored-by trailer for every commit during a live share session.

cc @pauljeannot