Re: What's in a name? Let's use a (uuid,name,email) triplet

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 1:27 PM, Linus Torvalds
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Michael Witten wrote:

quoted

Short Version:
-------------

Rather than use a (name,email) pair to identify people, let's use
a (uuid,name,email) triplet.

Even shorter version: NO.

quoted

Long Version:
------------

UUID's are some total crazy shit. It's like XML. If you think you need
them, you're almost certainly wrong. If it's about identifying a unique
piece of hardware, ok. If it's about identifying people, no.

We could hash people emails and then build a .mailmap equivalent thus
hiding their identity.

Several things needed to be combined to build that mailmap.
1) a lot of hand work to identify aliases and misspellings
2) work with google to translate email addresses into human names when
names were missing
3) a list of all of the email addresses that had been checked, to make
it easy to identify new ones.

The trouble with hashing it is that all of the tools that use it will
need to be rewritten.

I'd really like to see a more global database constructed that links
commits, lkml discussions and the various distribution bug databases
but apparently it is too much of a threat to developer privacy. You
can achieve the same effect with a few hours in google throwing out
bunches of false positives.  It would be cool to be looking at a
subroutine, poke a button and then see all of the human oriented
history around it instead of just the diffs.

How about you walk around with a bar-code tattooed to your forehead? Don't
like the idea? Then think about having to care about a uuid in your
projects. Same deal.

Nobody is going to associate themselves with a uuid. It's not how humans
work. It's degrading, and it's work-for-no-gain to anybody who doesn't
have OCD.

So in practice, the only thing that would happen is that people make up
random uuid's and they'd be different for every single machine they have,
because absolutely NOBODY would ever bother to try to save and move their
uuids around.

So when you point out that emails aren't unique, or that people change
their emails over time, please realize that the emails are _more_ stable
than a uuid would ever be. Because an email actually has some emotional
attachment to the person in question. Yes, they change. So do real names
too (which change more seldom, exactly because people are way _more_
emotionally attached to their real names).

uuid's? I can pretty much guarantee that for me, it would be different for
every single machine I have. Because I could just not be bothered to care.

                       Linus
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Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com