Nodes with a $node->uid assigned can not have author changed

If an attempt is made to amend an author it will fail because of this piece of logic

if (user_access('administer nodes') && !isset($node->uid)) {
    if ($account = user_load_by_name($node->name)) {
      $node->uid = $account->uid;
    }
    else {
      $node->uid = 0;
    }
  }

In that an existing node will always fail the second part of the if statement. D6 makes no check at all except for user_access which in theory could see a node assigned to uid = 0. My intial thoughts are that we should split out the if statement into 2 checks so as if we don't find a name we don't overwrite the existing uid. Patch attached.

On second thought this really is critical as the idea that a node can never change ownership after creation is a pretty fundamental flaw.

yeah, i have tried the code and i am able to Change the Author name.
Its working

The "Assigned to", is to tell that person is working in one patch, and not testing.

...and the issue title should describe the problem (even after a potential fix has been identified)

a) the patch in #1 needs to be created relative to the root of the Drupal install (not modules/node). I rerolled the patch from #1 to reflect this

b) the patch seems to fix the problem - woohoo!!!

c) I am concerned about this line in the comments above the lines being patched though:

// user ID, unless we've already been provided a user ID by other means.

What "other means"? If contrib modules (for example) are assigning a $node->uid, but not a $node->name then this change will cause that to stop working. I can imagine "devel generate" might do this. Gonna check... but I'd love to hear from someone else on this. I may be completely wrong here.

I created this bug in #398110: node_submit resets $node->uid ... sorry... It was first reported there. Moshe makes the solution clear in the comments: node_submit needs to go away completely. I've been meaning to write the patch, but haven't got to it yet.

If this code is correct, the PHP comment directly above should be updated.

The PHP comment is removed in the new patch provided in the original issue queue.

Looks like this was all fixed by the latest commit at #492186: Authoring information is never updated., although the bug report here was older.