Why does the authors matter. There is no reason a patchset or PR needs to be squashed into a single commit, they just should not be broken along the way.
It does not matter to the project. But it matters very much to some contributors. Especially young or newbie contributors who see this a recognition by the technical community. I have even seen people share there commits proudly in social media.
For those of us who have been doing this for a long time, we don't need that recognition (I have around 36,000 commits to the project), but that is not true of others. So I think we need to be respectful of contributors. I believe that we owe contributors of patches to the OS the public recognition that they deserve.
Greg
