Re: [PATCH] format-patch: add support for mailmap file

From: Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 14, 2024, 17:43 UTC
Message-ID: <CA+P7+xrHDX-=fqJTM7_4cQp5PJz6QKbM78JG5tYtZXJLbiVmDg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20240814072637.GA2077794@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024, 12:26 AM Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 05:20:41PM -0700, Jacob Keller wrote:
> > The internal tree commits are already baked and can't be changed. We can
> > of course fix the generated patches from these commits manually. It
> > seemed convenient to get mailmap to do this for us.
>
> I think that makes sense, especially if the caller is specifically
> asking to enable address mapping. I do wonder if the new format.mailmap
> might be surprising for some callers, though. For example, would a
> rebase using the "apply" backend quietly rewrite commit authors using
> the mailmap?
>
> -Peff

Ya, I think the config probably doesn't make sense thinking about it.

I also realized the actual problem we have is that the mail we send is including a dead address. It would make more sense to just allow send-email to translate from the old addresses to the canonical ones.

Specifically the issue we had is that an old commit to the internal repo was prepped for submission by a new owner, and when he sent the email, it automatically included the address of the original author, which ofcourse no longer is valid. This resulted in the mail annoying several people due to bouncing.

So the real problem to solve here is perhaps some way to filter the mails either via translation or removal so that we don't have it tagged to or cc a dead email. As I said above, its not like we expect the original author to actually respond or own the change, but we did not want to completely remove their name from the change, because they are the original person who wrote it.

In our case, it may be more useful to have the mailmap not at format-patch time but instead at email time...

Thanks, Jake