On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Michael Witten wrote: > > This is all that I'm saying: Keep git exactly the way it is, but add > one extra piece of identifying information for each person. The thing is, you don't seem to realize that most authorship is over email. Let's take some numbers from the kernel archive, for example. Here's _one_ trivial way to count it: - number of commits where author/committer email matches (presumably _not_ emailed, although sometimes people commit their own patches that were emailed around): [torvalds@i5 linux]$ git log --no-merges "--pretty=format:%h-%ae%n%h-%ce" | uniq -d | wc 33473 33473 959167 - total number of commits: [torvalds@i5 linux]$ git rev-list --no-merges HEAD | wc 176415 176415 7233015 IOW, less than a fifth of the patches were done by the person who actually committed things. 80%+ of all changes were committed by somebody else than the author. How do you think the authorship information can be transferred sanely, considering that the author didn't even use git in the first place? Really? That's where the typos/mistakes/missing-info really happens. And it often starts out with incomplete information, because the person has a bad email setup, and the thing only has an email address to begin with, ie the "From:" might literally say just "tytso@xxxxxxx" or something (to pick an example from the Cc list in this discussion - when Ted sends real emails, they tend to have proper naming). Sometimes we'll edit the messages to have the "From: xyz <abc>" thing at the top, fixing up the incomplete thing then. Typos happen there. Or the patch will simply come in two different ways, so there's no typo, yet there are two different emails that get author attribution. The thing is, development really is about human interaction. Yes, there's a tool involved (git), and once the data is in the tool we won't lose it any more, but this is about getting the data _into_ the tool in the first place. And the data you want to add simply DOES NOT EXIST. And we can't make it exist. The fact that even the trivial and obvious data that git _does_ ask for gets to be incomplete should tell you something. 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