Re: [PATCH v2] allow user aliases for the --author parameter

[resend, copy git list. Gah, Michael there is something about your
messages that causes me to keep dropping the git list when I reply. It
looks like maybe you send one message to the author without git@vger
cc'd, and then you send a different one 'to' the git list without the
original 'from' in the cc?]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 11:36:55AM +0200, Michael J Gruber wrote:

I don't see a namespace problem as long as nobody uses "name" or "email"
as $key.

It also ties our hands for putting more things in user.* later, since
now we will hurt users who have put their arbitrary aliases in user.*
(and who will rightly complain when we break their config).

That said I'd suggest useralias.$key.{name,email} then which gives a
cleaner separation and leaves the possibility to

I would be fine with that. Though I do think Junio's "automatic" version
is even nicer.

- use the alias for other cases than --author - use other fields than
name, email

I think the big user would be send-email; I don't know if that will ever
get converted to C, though.

People who don't use this feature don't have any entries and don't pay
anything.
People who use this feature and have a moderate number of entries don't
pay a recognizable price.
People who use this feature and have a vast amount of entries should be
told to implement an alias file parser ;)

This I agree with. :)

I'd be happy with that approach as well for my use case. In general it
may suffer from the uniqueness problem: If there's a recent commit
authored by "Michael@Jeff.com" your "--author=Jeff" will resolve
differently from yesterday, and you won't even notice (not even commit
-v tells you). [ A typo is punished by a search through all commits;
that's fine.]

The commit message template should say:

  Author: A U Thor [off-list ref]

but of course you won't see that if you are using "-m".

I wonder if there is a good way to warn that we have multiple matches.
Of course we expect many _exact_ matches if the author has multiple
commits, but we could look for distinct matches. However, even that will
turn up false positives, since some authors have multiple email
addresses.

-Peff