Re: [PATCH] git-commit: search author pattern against mailmap

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 23, 2013, 18:35 UTC
Message-ID: <20130823183541.GB30130@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqbo4opajg.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 10:44:03AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> My initial reaction was "Why should something as important as 'git
> commit' should be playing a guessing-game?" ;-) and I am kind of
> ashamed to have added 146ea068 (git commit --author=$name: look
> $name up in existing commits, 2008-08-26) and then am embarrased to
> have completely forgotten about it. I never use the feature myself.
> 
> But for that old and established "--author parameter that does not
> use the standard format guesses" feature to be useful, I agree that
> it should honor the mailmap.
> 
> I wonder if it would hurt anybody if we made this unconditional, not
> even with "--no-mailmap" override? Opinions?

I think it would be OK. You can always override by giving the actual full address you want instead of a partial one. And if somebody is not up to date in the .mailmap file, maybe this would be a good hint that you should take care of that. :)

I paused for a second, thinking that such advice might not be good for people who do not want to make an official change to upstream's .mailmap (e.g., because they do not want to pollute a long-running fork that will need to merge from upstream, or do not want to pollute a topic branch with an unrelated commit). But I forgot that we have mailmap.file, if they want something custom.

So I think anyone for whom the mailmap lookup does not provide the right answer will fall into one of two groups:

  1. A one-off, which can be overridden by specifying the address you
     do want.

  2. Somebody you will be mentioning frequently; bother to set up
     a mailmap.file.

As an aside, it seems silly that we do not respect $GIT_DIR/mailmap by default, even without a config option. But I doubt that anybody cares too much, if nobody has raised the issue in all of these years.

-Peff