On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Michael Witten wrote: > > Short Version: > ------------- > > Rather than use a (name,email) pair to identify people, let's use > a (uuid,name,email) triplet. Even shorter version: NO. > Long Version: > ------------ UUID's are some total crazy shit. It's like XML. If you think you need them, you're almost certainly wrong. If it's about identifying a unique piece of hardware, ok. If it's about identifying people, no. How about you walk around with a bar-code tattooed to your forehead? Don't like the idea? Then think about having to care about a uuid in your projects. Same deal. Nobody is going to associate themselves with a uuid. It's not how humans work. It's degrading, and it's work-for-no-gain to anybody who doesn't have OCD. So in practice, the only thing that would happen is that people make up random uuid's and they'd be different for every single machine they have, because absolutely NOBODY would ever bother to try to save and move their uuids around. So when you point out that emails aren't unique, or that people change their emails over time, please realize that the emails are _more_ stable than a uuid would ever be. Because an email actually has some emotional attachment to the person in question. Yes, they change. So do real names too (which change more seldom, exactly because people are way _more_ emotionally attached to their real names). uuid's? I can pretty much guarantee that for me, it would be different for every single machine I have. Because I could just not be bothered to care. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html