Re: RFD: fast-import is picky with author names (and maybe it should - but how much so?)

Felipe Contreras venit, vidit, dixit 09.11.2012 15:34:

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Michael J Gruber
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Hg seems to store just anything in the author field ("committer"). The
various interfaces that are floating around do some behind-the-back
conversion to git format. The more conversions they do, the better they
seem to work (no erroring out) but I'm wondering whether it's really a
good thing, or whether we should encourage a more diligent approach
which requires a user to map non-conforming author names wilfully.

So you propose that when somebody does 'git clone hg::hg hg-git' the
thing should fail. I hope you don't think it's too unbecoming for me
to say that I disagree.

There is no need to disagree with a proposal I haven't made. I would
disagree with the proposal that I haven't made, too.

IMO it should be git fast-import the one that converts these bad
authors, not every single tool out there. Maybe throw a warning, but
that's all. Or maybe generate a list of bad authors ready to be filled
out. That way when a project is doing a real conversion, say, when
moving to git, they can run the conversion once and see which authors
are bad and not multiple times, each try taking longer than the next.

As Jeff pointed out, git-fast-import expects output conforming to a
certain standard, and that's not going to change. import is agnostic to
where its import stream is coming from. Only the producer of that stream
can have additional information about the provenience of the stream's
data which may aid (possibly together with user input or choices) in
transforming that into something conforming.

Michael