Re: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS & files: Canonize the e-mails I use at files

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+samsung@kernel.org>]

Em Fri, 04 May 2018 13:58:39 +0300
Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@linux.intel.com> escreveu:

> On Fri, 04 May 2018, Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+samsung@kernel.org> wrote:
> > From now on, I'll start using my @kernel.org as my development e-mail.
> >
> > As such, let's remove the entries that point to the old
> > mchehab@s-opensource.com at MAINTAINERS file.
> >
> > For the files written with a copyright with mchehab@s-opensource,
> > let's keep Samsung on their names, using mchehab+samsung@kernel.org,
> > in order to keep pointing to my employer, with sponsors the work.
> >
> > For the files written before I join Samsung (on July, 4 2013),
> > let's just use mchehab@kernel.org.
> >
> > For bug reports, we can simply point to just kernel.org, as
> > this will reach my mchehab+samsung inbox anyway.  
> 
> I suppose this begs the question, why do we insist on adding our email
> addresses all over the place? On a quick grep, there are at least 40k+
> email addresses in the sources. Do we expect them all to be up-to-date
> too?

That's a good question.

The usual use case is that the e-mail allows people to contact developers
if needed. Such contact could simply due to something like handling SPDX
or other license-related issues or for troubleshooting.

There's also another reason (with IMHO, is more relevant): just the name
may not be enough to uniquely identify the author of some code. While
that might happen on occidental Countries, this is a way more relevant
for Asian Countries. For example, there are very few surnames on
some Countries there[1], and common names are usually... common. So, it
is not hard to find several people with exactly the same name working at
the same company. I've seen e-mails from those people that are things like
john.doe51@some.company, john.doe69@some.company, ...

[1] For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_surnames.

The e-mail is a way to uniquely identify a person. If we remove it,
then we may need to add another thing instead (like parents names,
security number or whatever), with would be weird, IMO. 

As we all use e-mails to uniquely identify contributors submissions,
IMHO, the best is to keep using e-mails. The side effect is that
we should keep those emails updated.

-

In the specific case of this patch, as I'm now just using @kernel.org
everywhere within the Kernel tree, I don't expect needing to change
it in long term.

Thanks,
Mauro
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