IntelliJ IDEA - Asterisk after author's name in git log

Question

In our git log we sometimes see an asterisk after the user name in the Author column. The same user is listed without the asterisk in other commits.

What does the asterisk stand for?

I'm using IntelliJ IDEA 15.0.6.

Answer 1

Every change in GIT (and in the most of modern VCS's) has an author and a committer. The Log shows an author because we respect authorship even if the author of changes doesn't have access to the repo or isn't able to commit code by himself.

Asterisk on the author's name in the Log means that this commit was created by the described person, but was applied by someone else.

Here is an illustration of how it looks:

There are some common cases when this happens:

• you cherrypicked someone else's commit
• you rebased branch with someone else's commits
• you applied .patch file mailed to you by someone else
• you merged the pull-request via GitHub UI - GitHub does it with its own user but leaves authorship to you.

Answer 2

It indicates that commit is the most recent commit to modify the file.

Annotations for lines modified in the current revision are marked with a bold type and an asterisk.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/investigate-changes.html#annotate_blame

Answer 3

That (the asterisk) is usually when another user has rebased the commits of the original author. You can confirm this in the message window on the lower right. It will show you the original author along with "committed by" with the name of the user who did the rebase.