Re: Dealing with corporate email recycling

[Peter Krefting <peter@softwolves.pp.se>]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2022, Sean Allred wrote:

> We are currently replaying a 15-year SVN history into Git -- with
> contributions from thousands of developers -- and are faced with the
> challenge of corporate email recycling, departures, re-hires, and name
> changes causing identity issues.

I have performed a couple of imports of old version history into Git, from
various version control systems, some of them with history dating to before
the corporation even had e-mail addresses for employees. In those cases I
found that the easiest option was just to use whatever user identification
was available in the old version control system -- Git does not explicitely
require a valid e-mail address in the author and committer header.

For Subversion import, for instance, I used "Name <login>" where "login" was
the Subversion committer ID, and "Name" was from a mapping file I created
for the repository. Where records were sketchy and Name information was not
available, I would just use "<login>".

When it comes to name changes, I have had scripts map login + date to name.
For instance, I changed my last name when I married, so I would have my old
(I don't know what the masculine equivalent of "maiden name" is in English)
mapped up until a specific date, and my current name afterwards.

-- 
\\// Peter