Re: [PATCH v2] allow user aliases for the --author parameter

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 27, 2008, 12:40 UTC
Message-ID: <20080827124010.GA13094@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <48B52037.7030405@fastmail.fm>

[resend, copy git list. Gah, Michael there is something about your messages that causes me to keep dropping the git list when I reply. It looks like maybe you send one message to the author without git@vger cc'd, and then you send a different one 'to' the git list without the original 'from' in the cc?]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 11:36:55AM +0200, Michael J Gruber wrote:

> I don't see a namespace problem as long as nobody uses "name" or "email"
> as $key.

It also ties our hands for putting more things in user.* later, since now we will hurt users who have put their arbitrary aliases in user.* (and who will rightly complain when we break their config).

> That said I'd suggest useralias.$key.{name,email} then which gives a
> cleaner separation and leaves the possibility to

I would be fine with that. Though I do think Junio's "automatic" version is even nicer.

> - use the alias for other cases than --author - use other fields than
> name, email

I think the big user would be send-email; I don't know if that will ever get converted to C, though.

Show 6 quoted lines

> People who don't use this feature don't have any entries and don't pay
> anything.
> People who use this feature and have a moderate number of entries don't
> pay a recognizable price.
> People who use this feature and have a vast amount of entries should be
> told to implement an alias file parser ;)

This I agree with. :)

Show 6 quoted lines

> I'd be happy with that approach as well for my use case. In general it
> may suffer from the uniqueness problem: If there's a recent commit
> authored by "Michael@Jeff.com" your "--author=Jeff" will resolve
> differently from yesterday, and you won't even notice (not even commit
> -v tells you). [ A typo is punished by a search through all commits;
> that's fine.]

The commit message template should say:

  Author: A U Thor <author@example.com>

but of course you won't see that if you are using "-m".

I wonder if there is a good way to warn that we have multiple matches. Of course we expect many _exact_ matches if the author has multiple commits, but we could look for distinct matches. However, even that will turn up false positives, since some authors have multiple email addresses.

-Peff