From: Erik Faye-Lund Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:25:26 GMT Subject: Re: What's in a name? Let's use a (uuid,name,email) triplet Message-ID: <40aa078e1003190825j57ba4a0axbb4d2bf7cbdb32d0@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Michael Witten wrote: > On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 08:56, Erik Faye-Lund wrote: >> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 3:40 PM, Michael Witten wrote: >>> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 08:08, Jakub Narebski wrote: >>>> First, the user.name and user.email does not need to be name and email >>>> from some email account.  It might be some "canonical name" and >>>> "canonical email". >>> >>> The vast majority of patches come in through email; the git tools >>> expect the user.name and user.email to reflect physical email account >>> information. >> >> What git tools would that be? > > Anything involving emailed patches. Which are...? > >> The only one I know of that does >> anything near assuming that is git send-email, and it only uses >> user.email if neither sendemail.from is configured nor --from option >> is specified. And even when it does, it prompts the user so it can be >> changed if called from a terminal. So I wouldn't say that it assumes >> anything about the "physicalness" of user.email, it just uses it's as >> the most sane default unless anything else has been specified. > > It's useless to spoof the From field because many email services won't > send it, a point I already covered in the email you quoted. > > When a patch is finally emailed, it's the From field that is used for > Author attribution. The From-field isn't assumed to be a physical-address, but the From-header is. If the From-field and the From-header are identical, the From-field doesn't get emitted. This is the same mechanism that is used when people forward patches from other authors, and there's no attempts to validate the From-field, only the From-header. So no, the author-email shouldn't need to be a physical address as far as send-email is concerned. -- Erik "kusma" Faye-Lund