[musl] Authorship/attribution and stalled patches

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

It came to my attention that there are a few patches in limbo where,
after some discussion, it seems I was waiting for an updated patch
from the contributor to apply, and it never appeared. I could and
should just make the changes myself (this would have been more
efficient to begin with), but I'm not sure what to do about
authorship/attribution in that situation, and it probably deserves
community input.

A while back, I started trying to make better use of git commit
authorship to credit contributors, rather than just mentioning "patch
by X" or "based on patch/idea by X" in commit messages. However I
still don't have a clear feel for how this should work in the case
where the patch is modified before being applied. Are there
established norms for the degree to which a patch should be modified
while leaving the author intact, or should it just always be converted
to commit authorship by the person who makes the final changes, with
original author in the description? It's really a tradeoff between
potential misattribution of mistakes or changes the original author
might not like, and failure to credit, and I don't know where the
right balance is.

Rich