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 08:56, Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 3:40 PM, Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 08:08, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> First, the user.name and user.email does not need to be name and email
>>> from some email account.  It might be some "canonical name" and
>>> "canonical email".
>>
>> The vast majority of patches come in through email; the git tools
>> expect the user.name and user.email to reflect physical email account
>> information.
>
> What git tools would that be?

Anything involving emailed patches.

> The only one I know of that does
> anything near assuming that is git send-email, and it only uses
> user.email if neither sendemail.from is configured nor --from option
> is specified. And even when it does, it prompts the user so it can be
> changed if called from a terminal. So I wouldn't say that it assumes
> anything about the "physicalness" of user.email, it just uses it's as
> the most sane default unless anything else has been specified.

It's useless to spoof the From field because many email services won't
send it, a point I already covered in the email you quoted.

When a patch is finally emailed, it's the From field that is used for
Author attribution.

You see? Your identity has been tied to whatever email service you
happen to use at any given time rather than to something with more
long term stability.