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

[Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 1:27 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Michael Witten wrote:
>>
>> Short Version:
>> -------------
>>
>> Rather than use a (name,email) pair to identify people, let's use
>> a (uuid,name,email) triplet.
>
> Even shorter version: NO.
>
>> Long Version:
>> ------------
>
> UUID's are some total crazy shit. It's like XML. If you think you need
> them, you're almost certainly wrong. If it's about identifying a unique
> piece of hardware, ok. If it's about identifying people, no.

We could hash people emails and then build a .mailmap equivalent thus
hiding their identity.

Several things needed to be combined to build that mailmap.
1) a lot of hand work to identify aliases and misspellings
2) work with google to translate email addresses into human names when
names were missing
3) a list of all of the email addresses that had been checked, to make
it easy to identify new ones.

The trouble with hashing it is that all of the tools that use it will
need to be rewritten.

I'd really like to see a more global database constructed that links
commits, lkml discussions and the various distribution bug databases
but apparently it is too much of a threat to developer privacy. You
can achieve the same effect with a few hours in google throwing out
bunches of false positives.  It would be cool to be looking at a
subroutine, poke a button and then see all of the human oriented
history around it instead of just the diffs.

>
> How about you walk around with a bar-code tattooed to your forehead? Don't
> like the idea? Then think about having to care about a uuid in your
> projects. Same deal.
>
> Nobody is going to associate themselves with a uuid. It's not how humans
> work. It's degrading, and it's work-for-no-gain to anybody who doesn't
> have OCD.
>
> So in practice, the only thing that would happen is that people make up
> random uuid's and they'd be different for every single machine they have,
> because absolutely NOBODY would ever bother to try to save and move their
> uuids around.
>
> So when you point out that emails aren't unique, or that people change
> their emails over time, please realize that the emails are _more_ stable
> than a uuid would ever be. Because an email actually has some emotional
> attachment to the person in question. Yes, they change. So do real names
> too (which change more seldom, exactly because people are way _more_
> emotionally attached to their real names).
>
> uuid's? I can pretty much guarantee that for me, it would be different for
> every single machine I have. Because I could just not be bothered to care.
>
>                        Linus
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-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com