In some situations you may want to group the commits not by author, but by committer instead. For example, when I just wanted to look up what I'm still missing from linux-next in the current merge window, I don't care so much about who wrote a patch, as what git tree it came from, which generally boils down to "who committed it". So make git shortlog take a "-c" or "--committer" option to switch grouping to that. Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds