Re: What's in a name? Let's use a (uuid,name,email) triplet

[Reece Dunn <msclrhd@googlemail.com>]

On 19 March 2010 14:40, Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com> wrote:
> Strictness about names and emails is difficult, and keeping something
> like the current .mailmap file up-to-date is a centralized process.
> The uuid field would distribute the responsibility of maintaining
> identity and make that responsibility easy because the user-chosen
> string is easy for that user to remember and is typed only very
> occasionally and under very specific circumstances.

I don't get this - it is the other way around.

For the mailmap file, you check that file into the git repository
itself. Therefore, by implication, mailmap *is* distributed. It is
therefore kept locally and accessed locally. It also does not suffer
from configuration issues, as you don't need to re-enter it if you
change your computer.

For a uuid to work the way you intend it, there would need to be some
universal central server that would be queried to look up and resolve
the uuid so you can get consistent user identification information for
every git command by every person/script from every git repository.
This is never going to fly for all the reasons distributed VCSs were
created in the first place.

Unless by distributed you mean in the .git/config file, which is
always local and never distributed to others. However, the uuid data
in the repository will be distributed in the repositories, so how is
this any better than what git has now?

- Reece