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

On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Jon Smirl wrote:

I had all of the names in the list so that I could regenerate the list
and diff it against the old version to know which new names needed to
be checked. Looking back I could have eliminated the names without
errors and then added a comment to the file as to the last date all of
the names were checked.  But that is less reliable than recording
which were checked. The problem is that if you lose track of what has
been checked, you are forced to recheck everything and it takes a long
time to recheck everything.

The part you keep missing is that NOBODY CARES!

For example, I exist in the current git kernel tree with 11 different 
names for just the authorship information:

     32 Linus Torvalds torvalds@evo.osdl.org
   1522 Linus Torvalds torvalds@g5.osdl.org
   4194 Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org
      7 Linus Torvalds torvalds@macmini.osdl.org
      2 Linus Torvalds torvalds@merom.osdl.org
      8 Linus Torvalds torvalds@osdl.org
    166 Linus Torvalds torvalds@ppc970.osdl.org
      4 Linus Torvalds torvalds@ppc970.osdl.org.(none)
      1 Linus Torvalds torvalds@quad.osdl.org
   1606 Linus Torvalds torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org
    174 Linus Torvalds torvalds@woody.osdl.org

(that's counts, in case you care). And then if you check signed-off lines, 
you'll find some _additional_ oddities where things just got misspelled, 
like

	Linus Torvalds [off-list ref]
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@akpm@linux-foundation.org>

where in one case there's a missing 'r', and in the other it's some odd 
perverse incestuous relationship between me and Andrew (in reality, it's 
me doing a stupid "search-and-replace" on the emails, adding my own 
sign-off to Andrew's and that got a bit too much copy-paste issues)

There's a few other mistakes like that in the sign-offs.

Does anybody care? Certainly not I. There is absolutely zero reason to 
worry about it. I used to find it convenient to see what machines I had 
worked on, so I actually included that. And one of them was clearly 
mis-configured, or git did something wrong when the hostname was already 
in FQDN format. Whatever.

There is no real _value_ in making a .mailcap for each such buggy entry is 
what I'm trying to tell you. Those things are maybe used for statistics. 
On the whole, they are correct. 

			Linus