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

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Linus Torvalds
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Michael Witten wrote:

quoted

This is all that I'm saying: Keep git exactly the way it is, but add
one extra piece of identifying information for each person.

The thing is, you don't seem to realize that most authorship is over
email.

Let's take some numbers from the kernel archive, for example. Here's _one_
trivial way to count it:

 - number of commits where author/committer email matches (presumably
  _not_ emailed, although sometimes people commit their own patches that
  were emailed around):

       [torvalds@i5 linux]$ git log --no-merges "--pretty=format:%h-%ae%n%h-%ce" | uniq -d | wc
         33473   33473  959167

 - total number of commits:

       [torvalds@i5 linux]$ git rev-list --no-merges HEAD | wc
        176415  176415 7233015

IOW, less than a fifth of the patches were done by the person who actually
committed things. 80%+ of all changes were committed by somebody else than
the author.

How do you think the authorship information can be transferred sanely,
considering that the author didn't even use git in the first place?
Really?

That's where the typos/mistakes/missing-info really happens. And it often
starts out with incomplete information, because the person has a bad email
setup, and the thing only has an email address to begin with, ie the
"From:" might literally say just "tytso@mit.edu" or something (to pick an
example from the Cc list in this discussion - when Ted sends real emails,
they tend to have proper naming).

If I recall correctly the top source of errors is variations in the
domain name of the email address. Second place was mangling of names
from non-ASCII charsets. Third place was human typos. Fourth was
inconsistency in the human name, like Ted's example.

A really simple check would be for git to say - I've never seen this
name/email combo before, are you sure it is correct before I commit
it.

PS - I am not in favor of the UUID scheme.

Sometimes we'll edit the messages to have the "From: xyz <abc>" thing at
the top, fixing up the incomplete thing then. Typos happen there. Or the
patch will simply come in two different ways, so there's no typo, yet
there are two different emails that get author attribution.

The thing is, development really is about human interaction. Yes, there's
a tool involved (git), and once the data is in the tool we won't lose it
any more, but this is about getting the data _into_ the tool in the first
place.

And the data you want to add simply DOES NOT EXIST. And we can't make it
exist. The fact that even the trivial and obvious data that git _does_ ask
for gets to be incomplete should tell you something.

                       Linus
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-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com