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 10:05,  <david@lang.hm> wrote:
>
> if you can force people to have a consistant UUID, you can force them to
> have a consistant e-mail address (and submit mapping updates if it changes)
>
> if you can't force people to maintain a consistant e-mail, why do you think
> they would maintain a consistant UUID?

Firstly, please note that a UUID is defined in this context as any
string that the user deems for himself to be uniquely identifying of
himself; a UUID allows a user to determine his canonical
representation from the very start.

There's no forcing; there can't be. This is meant to help users manage
their own identities.

A UUID is basically only subject to change due to:

    * typos when configuring

A name/email pair (as in the user.name and user.email variables) is
subject to change due to:

    * typos when configuring
    * legal name changes
    * email account switching

Naturally, older commits and wrong UUIDs would need mappings, but
that's no different than the current situation except for the fact
that UUIDs would not change as frequently.

That aside, an alternative solution that is not as powerful but that
is less invasive would be to allow users to transmit authorship
information as part of the patch payload separate from the usual email
headers (or something like this). Erik Faye-Lund suggests this is
already easily done, but I'm not so sure.