Re: Dealing with corporate email recycling

From: Sean Allred <allred.sean@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 13, 2022, 13:35 UTC
Message-ID: <874k42ar61.fsf@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <27b5bf20-2eb5-7873-4fdd-875aa699862c@iee.email>

Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> 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.

Whether or not we have maintained such a list in real-time remains to be seen, but we have been able to put together such a list using both SVN history and a variety of other internal data sources. It's worth noting that, if we do have to use this generated mapping, a mapping of over 10k entries is surely to have the odd mistake every now and then. So it's not *totally* trustworthy (and never could be).

> 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).

This is definitely on the table, though it seems a shame to not attempt to use the information we've been able to compile.

-- Sean Allred