From what I can tell the reason is that that’s the way it was always done. As I understand it, back in the days before there were distributed version control sy

From what I can tell the reason is that that’s the way it was always done. As I understand it, back in the days before there were distributed version control systems, Bram was the only one who could commit to the code-base so he would credit the actual author of a submitted patch in the commit message. He continued this practice after the Vim project moved to Mercurial (and Git). Related discussion: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/1554 https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/1554