git-duet makes use of the committer field of git commits to allow paired pairing while maintaining identity.

Traditionally, pairing programmers have to settle for either:

• Only associating one of their names and email addresses with the commit
• Abusing user.name and user.email to create an amalgamation of their names and e-mails (this is what many other tools do, such as git-pair). Resulting in commits that are attributed to a fictitious identity such as Josh Susser & Sam Pierson <pair+jsusser+sam@pivotallabs.com>

git-duet takes a different approach and sets the author and the committer on a commit allowing two individuals to associate their real names and e-mails with a commit resulting in commits like:

$ git show --pretty=fuller
commit 54486ba89913e209f00903bdef34fc38e61edeb0
Author:     Jane Doe <jane.doe@example.com>
AuthorDate: Sat Jun 20 17:55:19 2015 -0700
Commit:     John Doe <john.doe@example.com>
CommitDate: Sat Jun 20 17:55:19 2015 -0700

Paired commit

Signed-off-by: John Doe <john.doe@example.com>

diff --git a/foo b/foo
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e69de29

This is a port of https://github.com/meatballhat/git-duet to Golang because this was found to be more performant and have less issues during usage due to Ruby version managers like rbenv and rvm that frequently complain that git-duet is not installed in a given version of Ruby when not using the system Ruby. Many kudos to @meatballhat for the initial implementation.

Installing

Download the binaries from https://github.com/git-duet/git-duet/releases and place them in your $PATH.

Usage

Create a ~/.git-authors with your authors:

authors:
  jd: Jane Doe; jane
  fb: Frances Bar
  email:
    domain: awesometown.local

Use git duet <author initals> <committer initials> to set the author and committer.

Use git duet-commit to commit using the set author and committer (I recommend aliasing this, e.g. git dci).

Use git solo jd to erase the committer and just set the author (for when you aren’t pairing).

Example:

$ mkdir your-repo
$ cd your-repo
$ git init
$ touch README.md
$ git add -A
$ git duet jd fb
$ git duet-commit -m 'Initial commit'
$ git show --pretty=fuller

See README.md for more configuration options.

Admittedly this is still a hack to fit the concept of pairing on code into the constraints of the metadata git allows to be associated with a commit, but I find that this hack is better than combining names and emails into the author of the commit for the following reasons:

• Can easily search for commits that a given user has touched
• Tools like GitHub are able to hyperlink commits to users and notify the appropriate user when a commit has been commented upon.

Eventually git may support the notion of multiple authors (see: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=451880) at which point git-duet will change to utilize this.