Re: [PATCH] mailinfo: don't discard names under 3 characters

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 30, 2020, 10:06 UTC
Message-ID: <20200130100654.GA840101@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20191220003948.60272-1-edef@edef.eu>

On Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 12:39:48AM +0000, edef wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> I sometimes receive patches from people with short mononyms, and in my
> cultural environment these are not uncommon. To my dismay, git-am
> currently discards their names, and replaces them with their email
> addresses.
> 
> Link: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
> ---
> I'm not *completely* sure there's even a case where `src = email` is 
> the right thing to do, but I'd rather not modify this code more than 
> strictly necessary.

I think this makes sense. There's a lot of heuristic voodoo in this old mailinfo code, but I think getting people's legitimate short names wrong is worse than the likelihood that this is actually helping some broken-parsing case in any meaningful way. I suspect this code predates us parsing the headers carefully according to the standard (it looks to be from 2744b2344d on 2005-04-11, which is quite early!).

The 60-char maximum also seems like something people might run afoul of in certain cultures. Is it worth bumping, too?

I think your patch slipped through the cracks, coming as it did over the holidays. It's probably worth re-posting it (with your signed-off-by).

-Peff