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

On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Reece Dunn wrote:

What would be better is having a concept of identity aliases. That is,
a user can say that (for this git project), (user1,email1) is the same
person as (user2,email2). This would allow someone who has
mis-configured their git instance to say what the (user,email) pair
should have been. It also allows people to say that they used to be
called someone and they are now called somebody.

Yeah. And that's what '.mailmap' is, really.

Does mailmap get annoying? Yes. Is it going to be incomplete? Yes. Do we 
ever even _bother_ to try to make it perfect? No.

In the kernel, for example, we tend to use it _only_ to fix up the real 
name. It's much more capable than that (ie you can use it to fix up email 
addresses too), but we literally haven't cared enough to bother. So you 
still see the "localhost" emails or the "(none)" domains - even if you use 
one of the formats that ask for a "fixed" name and email.

And git itself only fixes up names for certain commands (git blame, git 
shortlog) and with specific format specifiers (%aN and %aE).

The _default_ pretty log format printouts don't do it, for example. Should 
they? Maybe. Or maybe we should have a flag and/or config option to do so 
by default.

				Linus