Re: email address handling

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:50:05 -0700
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

> Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> writes:
> 
> >> The part _you_ don't seem to understand is that my point is
> >> 
> >>  - git changed that "From:" line to an "Author:" line
> >> 
> >>  - "git log" isn't an email system. It's a human-readable (and 
> >>    machine-parseable, for that matter) log.
> >
> > What you're describing here is some explicit or implicit git design
> > decision and then telling me how it's implemented.
> >
> > Well, what I'm saying is that it was an incorrect design decision.
> 
> What is the objective of your statement in this discussion?  Further add
> fuel to flame, or to seek avenues that lead to some improvement in a
> constructive way?

Well initially it was to work out why the heck my git-log output had
stripped the quotes from that person's name, making it unusable for
email purposes.  I'd actually assumed that it was a bug.

> The thing is, I do not think reverting that design decision is an option
> at this point.  People's repositories record <Name, Email> pair already in
> "human readable" form, and people's scripts are assuming that.
> 
> I misspoke about git-send-email earlier; it already has sanitize_address()
> that massages the addresses on From: To: and Cc: lines.  In fact, it even
> seems to have logic to avoid double-quoting, so it would be Ok if you
> changed the design decision this late in the game for that particular
> script, but that does not mean it is a good change --- other scripts
> people may have built around git would need to change.
> 
> So the earlier patch from Dscho (Johannes) may be a step in the right
> direction, but if we are going to rewrite the author information, (1) it
> has to be an option, and (2) when rewriting, it should not be just From:;
> but Signed-off-by:, Cc: and other <Name, Email> pairs at the end of the
> log message would need similar treatment, so that you can cut and paste
> any of them to your MUA.

I preserve the quotes (when present) in signoffs for this exact reason.