Michael Witten <mfwitten@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Short Version: > ------------- > > > Rather than use a (name,email) pair to identify people, let's use > a (uuid,name,email) triplet. > > The uuid can be any piece of information that a user of git determines > to be reasonably unique across space and time and that is intended to > be used by that user virtually forever (at least within a project's > history). > > For instance, the uuid could be an OSF DCE 1.1 UUID or the SHA-1 of > some easily remembered, already reasonably unique information. ... or 'canonical-name canonical-email' pair. > > This could really help keep identifications clean, and it is rather > straightforward and possibly quite efficient. > > > Long Version: > ------------ [...] > While git's use of (name,email) pairs to identify each person is > extremely practical, it turns out that it's rather `unstable'; This is non-solution to non-problem. First, the user.name and user.email does not need to be name and email from some email account. It might be some "canonical name" and "canonical email". Second, there are (I think) two main sources of 'unstability' in (name,email) pairs, namely A) misconfigured git (when fetching/pushing using git itself), B) wrong name in email etc. (when sending patches via email, 80% of patches in Linux kernel case). In the case of misconfigured git (case A) using UUID wouldn't help, and only make it worse (you would have to configure the same UUID on each machine). What would help here is for git to be more strict and perhaps forbid (some of) autogenerated names and emails. In the case of sending patches via email, you can use in-body 'From:' to provide (name,email) part that is different than account used to send email. In the case of UUID you would need the same: some way to provide UUID in patch (in email). UUID has the disadvantage of being required also when (name,email) in From: email header is good user ID. So UUID wouldn't help there either. What could help in both cases is .mailmap being used (perhaps on demand) in more git commands. See Documentation/mailmap.txt or e.g. git-shortlog(1) manpage. It is quite advanced tool for correcting mistakes (it can correct *both* user name, which is most common usage, but also email address). -- Jakub Narebski Poland ShadeHawk on #git -- 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