Re: email address handling

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

On Fri, 1 Aug 2008 13:40:00 -0700 (PDT)
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Fri, 1 Aug 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > 
> > pls read earlier email.
> 
> I did. It seems that your complaint is:
> 
> > So unless he explicitly typed a "From:" line (without quoting his name)
> > into the top of his changelog, some piece of software somewhere has
> > stripped the quotes when it was converting his name from the email
> > headers into the git Author: line.
> 
> And yes, git will strip out all the crap and try to make it into a real 
> name.
> 
> 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.

> If you want to turn it into emails, you need to follow the email rules. 
> You're cutting-and-pasting anyway, it's not like this is fundamentally 
> hard.

Here is a real story from a real user of your software:

I very very frequently copy and paste name+email address out of git
output and into an MUA.  Have done it thousands and thousands of times,
and it has always worked.  I'm sure that many others do the same thing.

Yesterday, I copied and pasted what _looked_ like a usable
name+email-address from some git output and into an MUA.  Unlike the
thousands of preceding times, it did not work.

I think it was reasonable of me to assume that it would work.  Blaming
the surprised and misled user for not understanding some earlier
internal design decision didn't satisfy him!

True story!  From a user.