Re: Git Rebase blows away GIT_AUTHOR_NAME

[Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 4:41 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 1:53 AM, Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Linus, you wrote sanity_check (from 2744b23). Do you remember if there
>> were any specific reason for the minimum length of 3 of an
>> author-name? It seems that in Sweden, legal names can be even a single
>> letter (see Tor's comment)...
>
> Even if the legal name would be a single letter, you'd still need to
> have a surname.
>

I think Tor pointed out that he knew a swede with his full legal name
to be only one letter long. I would suppose that meant that he didn't
have a surename?

> The three-letter minimum is just a sanity check. If your name really
> is even just three letters, I suspect you're just lying. I don't know
> of anybody named "A B".
>

Thanks for clarifying that it's not there for a technical reason. The
thing is, git-am seems to be the only place where such a sanity-check
is performed. Shouldn't git-commit rather perform such checks also (if
such a check should be done at all), perhaps with an override similar
to --allow-empty? And on top of all it doesn't barf, it just silently
replace the name with the e-mail...

> That thing is supposed to be a *NAME*. Not shorthand. Not your first
> name. Not your nickname. If you have a nickname, put it in quotes
> inside the real name.
>
> I've seen too many broken source control systems that just take your
> login as a name *cough*CVS*cough*, and then people think it's
> "convenient" and "cool" to have a short name.
>
> It's not convenient. It's not cool. It's just shorthand where
> shorthand doesn't help. Then you end up using it in a public setting,
> and suddenly your cool shorthand or nickname isn't even remotely
> unique.
>
> No, there is no uniquness "requirements" for the name, but come on.
> Look at shortlog output some day. We try to use just the name because
> it looks better. But if people don't use their full name, it just
> looks _stupid_

I agree with you that using nicknames etc as author-name is a bit
silly, but I'm not sure if I want my version control system to tell me
that it thinks my author-name looks stupid :)

IMO, we should probably just remove the check altogether.

There's also an upper-bound of 60 characters. I'm wondering if this
could be hit by valid names, especially with non-western UTF-8
characters. Perhaps this should be removed also. The check for '@',
'<' and '>' is probably still OK.