Re: Dealing with corporate email recycling

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email>
Date: Mar 13, 2022, 12:20 UTC
Message-ID: <27b5bf20-2eb5-7873-4fdd-875aa699862c@iee.email>
In-Reply-To: <878rtebxk0.fsf@gmail.com>

On 12/03/2022 22:38, Sean Allred wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Hi all,
>
> We are currently replaying a 15-year SVN history into Git -- with
> contributions from thousands of developers -- and are faced with the
> challenge of corporate email recycling, departures, re-hires, and name
> changes causing identity issues.

Naming is a big issue [1,2].

Do you already have a map of those personal name and email name changes that are causing conflicts, or are you hoping for a way of detecting such changes? If you already know which names produce conflicts you are more than half way there.

If you do know of the name conflicts, (e.g. when `John Doe` changed to `Jane Doe2`, then acquired `Jane Doe`, before being put back to `Jane Doe2`), do you have dates for the change over to map into the commit dates (assuming no slop or author/committer date slip). At least with the change-over dates you can apply mapping during the history transfer.

An alternate option is to simply stick with the fact that history is messy, and use internal corporate knowledge for the few case that cause the major issues. It some point it always gets to be a Gödel Grammar (needing another rule).

Philip

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ [2] https://acrl.ala.org/techconnect/post/names-are-hard/