Re: [PATCH] .mailmap: Entries for Alex Bennée,Deskin Miller, Vitaly "_Vi" Shukela

Michael J Gruber [off-list ref] writes:

Maybe I should have cc'ed Vitaly, the others are straight typo fixes.
(One may even argue that Vitaly's change is, too.) Smothering on the
backburner for a while, is fine, though ;)

Nico is right; what I wrote sounded that the patch will be forever on hold
until I get all three acks, but that wasn't my intention.

Also, if used without "-e", shortlog coalesces authors by full name. I
reckon this is the most common way it is used, and it's the mode for
which I provided cleanup.

If you distinguish by e-mail (-e) then there are many obvious multiple
entries, but it's not up to me to decide which is the main e-mail
address. One could take the latest one used, but some people distinguish
between work for hire (maybe for several employers) and private submissions.

True.

We might want to allow projects to use different mode of operation if they
so desire, though.  Linus Torvalds at OSDL and Linus Torvalds at L-F may
be one same person, and the person who is summarizing may want to
coallesce his commmits like this, even under "-e" option:

    Linus Torvalds [off-list ref],[off-list ref],[off-list ref] (1093):
      Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell
      Add copyright notices.
      ... (many more commits) ...

while there may be more than one John Smiths that we can differenciate only
by email and they get their own separate group as different people (each
of them may have more than one email addresses).

If a grouping of set of name-mail pairs per individual is kept somewhere,
that can be used to enhance shortlog to support such a use case [*1*].
And the UUID thing could be one possible implementation (you make
name-mail pair to first map to some third identifier, and treat name-mail
pairs that map to the same identifier as "one person").  But I don't think
it would work well if you forced the maintenance burden of such a mapping
to individuals.


[Footnote]

*1* unless there is a situation where one person (say "Junio C Hamano")
stopped using one e-mail address (say "junkio@cox.net") s/he has been
using, and then a different person with the same name came and started
using the same address, that is.