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

Jon Smirl venit, vidit, dixit 19.03.2010 15:33:

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Michael Witten [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

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

The uuid can be any piece of information that a user of git determines
to be reasonably unique across space and time and that is intended to
be used by that user virtually forever (at least within a project's
history).

For instance, the uuid could be an OSF DCE 1.1 UUID or the SHA-1 of
some easily remembered, already reasonably unique information.

... or 'canonical-name canonical-email' pair.

quoted

This could really help keep identifications clean, and it is rather
straightforward and possibly quite efficient.


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

[...]

quoted

While git's use of (name,email) pairs to identify each person is
extremely practical, it turns out that it's rather `unstable';

This is non-solution to non-problem.

First, the user.name and user.email does not need to be name and email
from some email account.  It might be some "canonical name" and
"canonical email".

Second, there are (I think) two main sources of 'unstability' in
(name,email) pairs, namely A) misconfigured git (when fetching/pushing
using git itself), B) wrong name in email etc. (when sending patches
via email, 80% of patches in Linux kernel case).

Another top source is mangling of non-ASCII charsets when they go
though the email system. Are the git work flow tools safe for
alternative charsets? Do the email tools look at the charset header of
the email message? Check people's names in the kernel commits and
you'll find lots of examples of this type of mangling.

Or even the quoting of quotes for nick names, appearing as 'nick',
"nick", \"nick\", nick and what not.

Or people not using UTF-8. There are files in the kernel where
people's names are in conflicting codepages. Should git try to look
for diffs that aren't UTF-8?

You and others are proving a very important point here: This is really
an lkml proxy fight being taken to the git list, after the futile
mailmap-ification there.

People may disagree on the best approach in general, but this thread
clearly shows:

- The Git community is happy with mailmap for git.git.
- The Git community does not see any need for amending the mailmap
mechanism.
- How you actually use mailmap (leniently or enforcing) is a per-project
decision, just like the patch workflow, the meaning and use of s-o-b
lines, the requirement for full names and many other things.

But since the git list is hosted on kernel.org we can't really complain
about providing room for an lkml discussion ;)

Michael