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

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Linus Torvalds
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Jon Smirl wrote:

quoted

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

So? Why? What's the advantage?

I happen to think that the concept of privacy and working on an open
source project are fairly incompatible. But apparently their are
people who think otherwise.  The use would be to reconstruct that
mailmap I made, but with the email addresses replaced with SHA1 hashes
of the email. No human would use the SHA1s, they're just there to
obscure the emails.

I literally _only_ see disadvantages to the whole thing. If the uuid has
some meaning (ie it's related to actual _real_ information), then it is
nothing but a really inconvenient placeholder for the real information,
adn another source of new problems (like "how do we know they are in
sync? I edit the .gitconfig file by hand all the time").

And if it doesn't have meaning, then it's just annoying and will never
ever be attached to anything relevant long-term.

Either way, there are only downsides, no upsides. There is absolutely _no_
way that teh uuid would ever actually encode any real meaningful
information that isn't better represented by the name/email.

                       Linus

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com