Contributors, please check your names

A handy way to look at the list of contributors is:

	$ git shortlog -s --since=6.month

This shows the number of patches in our history for each contributor. The patch author name (excluding e-mail part) is used for summarizing, and this allows the same person to send patches under more than one e-mail address and still count these patches as authored by one person.

Your name however can appear more than once in different spellings, if you sent patches using different human-readable names on From: line of your patch submission from the same (or different) e-mail address. E.g. these two patches are counted under different authors:

	Author: A. U. Thor <author@example.xz>
        Date:   Wed Jul 09:23:06 2008 -0700

	The first patch...

        Author: A U Thor <author@example.xz>
        Date:   Wed Jul 09:23:07 2008 -0700

	The second patch...

There is a "mailmap" mechanism to consolidate them; it allows us to specify what human-readable name should be used for given e-mail address. The hypothetical Mr. Thor might want to say "I am A. U. Thor; some commits from me, <author@example.xz>, are marked without abbreviating periods in my name", and we can add this entry to the toplevel .mailmap file to fix it:

	A. U. Thor <author@example.xz>

It tells the shortlog (and --pretty=format:%aN in recent enough git) mechanism to give huma readable name "A. U. Thor" anytime it sees <author@example.xz> e-mail address, regardless of what the Author: header in the commit object says.

If your name appears more than once in the output from the "shortlog" command at the beginning of this message, you may want to tell me to fix it.

Thanks.