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 06:34, Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org> wrote:
> On 03/18/2010 10:57 PM, Michael Witten wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 16:39, Martin Langhoff
>> <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Michael Witten<mfwitten@gmail.com>
>>>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 16:19, Martin Langhoff
>>>>>
>>>>> What's the value? For me it'll be "Martin Langhoff". I already have
>>>>> that.
>>>>
>>>> Well, that's rather egotistical considering you're probably not the
>>>> only Martin Langhoff in this world. I'd advocate something like
>>>> "Martin Langhoff<martin.langhoff@gmail.com>".
>>>
>>> So you are saying we should change the core datamodel of git to say...
>>> what we already can say?
>>
>> You see, Martin, you might want/need to stop using "Martin Langhoff
>> <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>" as your email account, but there's no
>> reason why you can't continue to use it for your UUID.
>
> While a gnu.org or gmail.com will (most likely) stay with some person
> forever, hindsight is 20/20 and many people may generate his UUID from a
> work email.  So, suppose I make my UUID based on <pbonzini@redhat.com> what
> will guarantee that in 20 years I won't find a new career as a bartender,
> and Red Hat wouldn't hire someone with my same name, and give him the same
> email address?

Firstly, the UUID need not be a name/email pair.

Secondly, you're being ridiculous; even if that ridiculous scenario
played out not-infrequently, there would still be less identity
confusion in git repos over time, because changing real life names,
and changing email accounts do happen frequently and are not
ridiculous events.

> Heck, some people use gmail only for their personal email, and they rightly
> cannot be bothered to create another account to solve a problem they don't
> understand and they probably do not have.

This doesn't make any sense. Why does anybody need to create another
account? Are you still confused about what a uuid is this context?

> For the UUID to make sense, it would need to be what the acronym says:
> universally unique.  An SHA-1 value is _not_ universally unique, it is just
> a one-way function.  There are tons of git repos out there with a blob
> hashing to e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391 or
> 257cc5642cb1a054f08cc83f2d943e56fd3ebe99.

The SHA-1 is supposed to be an optimization; it's not essential, as
I've already explained; I also get the feeling that you're being
ridiculous again. In particular, I don't see your point.

> I have an idea.  Start your own website uuidemail.com.  One registers and
> gets an alias for their email, something like
> 8aacc35ffca0d34fccf8a750e84e3a81bdcb940b@uuidemail.com.  Then people can
> start using
> 8aacc35ffca0d34fccf8a750e84e3a81bdcb940b+pbonzini--redhat.com@uuidemail.com
> as their git user.email.  I bet nobody will.

This is nonsense that betrays your misunderstanding.