Junio C Hamano said the following on 02.02.2009 04:03:
This extended mapping is necessary when a company wants to have their repositories open to the public, but needs to protect the identities of the developers. It enables you to only show nicks and standardized emails, like 'Dev123 <bugs@xxxxxxxxxx>' in the public repo, but by using an private mailmap file, map the name back to 'John Doe <john.doe@xxxxxxxxxx>' inside the company.I do not find the "necessary" argument very convincing nor I find the particular use case sane. You may want to do things that way, but I do not know if it is the best way to go about it.
Well, this is the use-case for my company. We have open-source repos, which are the exact same repos which the company's developers work on, not a modified mirror repo. However, laws in some countries requires that employees information be kept away from the public, should they so wish. So, for our developers to work on the exact same repo as the open-source community, we need a way to map both Names and Emails back to the original author, inside the company without using a different repo.
Also, the company commit policy might be such that the email on the commit is always the companys <bugs@xxxxxxxxxx>. This might be so that if someone finds a bug to your commit, they send the bug report to the companys bug-tracker instead of the individual email address. However, that breaks the old mailmap system, since it requires unique email addresses to map to a name.
The new mapping however brings in more flexibility, and there may be other use cases where people benefit from that flexibility. I am slightly in favor than neutral to this new feature.
You could use this feature in git.git itself, where for example
Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx>
Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> <junio@xxxxxxxxxxx>
(or any of the others in the .mailmap file with X number of different
email addresses), to ensure that you are always associated with one
specific email address.
-- .marius [@trolltech.com] 'if you know what you're doing, it's not research'
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