Re: 463 kernel developers missing!

[Theodore Tso <tytso@MIT.EDU>]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 12:13:37AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> Personally, I have no objection to the mailmap file as it's on the
> whole an improvement; if it's been automatically generated and it
> falsely maps multiple people to a single person, that would be highly
> unfortunate, but maybe it fixes more problems than it creates.

Typo correction.  The first part of that sentence should read:

"Personally, I have no objection to the mailmap file IF on the
whole it's an improvement...."

> I think the part most people are seriously objecting to is that the
> supposition that Linus and some of his top lieutenants should be
> enforcing some arbitrary rule that rejects commits if they come from
> addresses outside of your .mailmap file (unless they first send a
> patch to add their e-mail address to the .mailmap file), in some kind
> of misguided attempt to enforce validation, which apparently the main
> justification for which is so that you and others can runs some
> statistical analysis, of which there seems to be some dispute whether
> or not encouraging people to compete to get into the top 20
> signed-off-by by splitting up commits into 100 different micro-patches
> should be considered a desirable side effect of said statistical
> analysis.
> 
> As I said earlier, the moment you started advocating enforcing
> validation, you may have started to confuse which is the tail and
> which is the dog.  People should be supplying patches to improve the
> kernel; not to provide accurate fodder for statistical analysis.
> 
> 						- Ted