only_authors parameter appears to match full name instead of username

[eliasgb2409]

Hi!

I'm encountering an issue while using PyDriller's only_authors parameter. According to the documentation, it states:

only_authors (List[str]): only analyses commits that are made by these authors. The check is made on the username, NOT the email.

However, when I pass a list of GitHub usernames to only_authors, I receive an empty response. If I instead provide the full names of the authors (as they appear in the commit metadata), I get results.

The problem is that some users have multiple full names recorded across different commits (possibly due to different Git configurations), which makes it difficult to track a single user reliably across repositories. This creates logistical challenges when analyzing a large number of commits, as I need to manually map all name variations to their corresponding GitHub username.

Given the documentation, I expected PyDriller to match GitHub usernames when filtering commits using only_authors.

Here's a simplified version of my code:

for commit in Repository(path_to_repo=repo_list, since=since, to=to, only_authors=copilot_authors).traverse_commits():
        record = {
            "User": commit.author.name,  
            "Date": commit.committer_date.date(),
            "Repository": commit.project_name, 
            "Insertions": commit.insertions,
            "Deletions": commit.deletions,
            "Total lines": commit.lines,
            "Files changed": commit.files,
            "Unit size": unit_size,
            "Complexity": complexity,
        }

Does only_authors actually check usernames, or does it filter based on the commit author’s full name as recorded in Git?

Thankyou!

[eliasgb2409]

UPDATE: I'm testing this in an organization I'm analyzing. Some usernames return results, while others give empty responses. However, using the full name for those users works. Any idea why this happens?