From: A Large Angry SCM Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:17:48 GMT Subject: Re: What's in a name? Let's use a (uuid,name,email) triplet Message-ID: <4BA2A68C.1040708@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4ba2293f.c5c2f10a.5e9c.5c4a@mx.google.com> Michael Witten wrote: > Short Version: > ------------- > > > Rather than use a (name,email) pair to identify people, let's use > a (uuid,name,email) triplet. > > The uuid can be any piece of information that a user of git determines > to be reasonably unique across space and time and that is intended to > be used by that user virtually forever (at least within a project's > history). > > For instance, the uuid could be an OSF DCE 1.1 UUID or the SHA-1 of > some easily remembered, already reasonably unique information. > > This could really help keep identifications clean, and it is rather > straightforward and possibly quite efficient. > > > Long Version: > ------------ [Much text deleted] The formatting of the information in the author & committer fields are a _social_ convention (with a little help from the tools).You can actually use this proposed "feature" now for your own commits by appending the UUID string to you name config setting, environment variable and/or GCOS field today and everything will work. You can even make it a requirement for projects that you control. But don't expect all other projects to do so also as they may not care.