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

[Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 06:09, Reece Dunn <msclrhd@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 19 March 2010 11:54, Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 04:45:38AM -0700, david@lang.hm wrote:
>>> here is where you are missing the point.
>>>
>>> no, there is not 'much less chance' of it getting messed up.
>>>
>>> you seem to assume that people would never need to set the UUID on
>>> multiple machines.
>>>
>>> if they don't need to set it on multiple machines, then the
>>> e-mail/userid is going to be reliable anyway
>>>
>>> if they do need to set it on multiple machines and can't be bothered
>>> to keep their e-mail consistant, why would they bother keeping this
>>> additional thing considtant? Linus is pointing out that people don't
>>> care now about their e-mail and name, and will care even less about
>>> some abstract UUID
>>>
>>> people who care will already make their e-mail consistant.
>>
>> While I don't agree with the need for that uuid thing, I'd like to
>> pinpoint that people who care can't necessarily make their e-mail
>> consistant. For example, Linus used to use an @osdl.org address, and
>> he now uses an @linux-foundation.org address. It's still the same Linus,
>> but the (name, email) pair has legitimately changed.
>
> So create an aliases list that maps one (name,email) to another that
> is from the same person. There is no need for an additional item (a
> uuid) to solve this problem. It also means that searching on any
> (name,email) pair will find the others, so you only need to
> remember/find one of the identities for the person you are interested
> in finding the commits for.
>
> AFAICS, mailmap is about correcting mistakes (primarily in the
> reported name for a given email address). In this case, mailmap and
> this aliases-map will work in conjunction with each other to give what
> the original poster wanted. However, I haven't seen any of his replies
> that answer this (or sufficiently address why mailmap does not solve
> his problem).

See:

    http://marc.info/?l=git&m=126900051102958&w=2

The idea is to distribute the responsibility for maintaining a
consistent identity AND to make that responsibility EASY.

The extra uuid `field' can only suffer from typos, while the
name/email pair can suffer from typos, changing email accounts, and
changing real life names. If the uuid `field' does get bungled by a
typo or is not used, then we're no worse off than we were before.