GnuChangelogLogFormatter should print apparent authors not committers

[Martin von Gagern]

I was a bit surprised to find out that the GNU ChangeLog log formatter only ever prints committers, not authors.

I guess one of the most important uses of this GNU ChangeLog generation is distributing them with release tarballs. Only mentioning committers fails to give credit to those actually authoring a change, and might also be problematic in terms of copyright issues. So I'd suggest using the first apparent author instead.

Of course it would be even better if there was some command line switch to choose between the alternatives, maybe even name the committer together with the full list of apparent authors. Such a command line switch could be useful to other log formats as well.

[Martin von Gagern (gagern)]

I've attached two branches. One does the single one line fix of using the first apparent author for gnu changelog format. I'd like to see this merged into bzr.dev soon.

The other branch, lp:~gagern/bzr/bug513322-authors is a first stab at the suggestion from the last paragraph of the original bug report. It implements a new option, --authors, allowing users to override the author selection method on the command line. The three possible values are "all", "first" and "committer". That one might be much harder to get into bzr.dev, so I'll need some guidance there, and would like to only tackle that when the first branch is merged.