Re: [Q] do we have your name correctly?

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: May 13, 2015, 22:58 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGZ79kaNXRbJ8DEfFahSSOgpawt1v=v0eWwAEtPQqPaoE1sb5w@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqa8x89k0x.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 3:42 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> Before cdb6b5ac (.mailmap: Combine more (name, email) to individual
> persons, 2013-08-12), we used to have this entry in .mailmap:
>
>     Brian M. Carlson <sandals <at> crustytoothpaste.ath.cx>
>
> but then it was replaced with two entries with that commit to
>
>     brian m. carlson <sandals <at> crustytoothpaste.ath.cx> \
>         Brian M. Carlson <sandals <at> crustytoothpaste.ath.cx>
>     brian m. carlson <sandals <at> crustytoothpaste.ath.cx> \
>         <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
>
> (they are two lines; backslashes are just for this e-mail).
>
> Because the RHS is searched in the committer and author fields and
> replaced to the LHS when .mailmap is used, this forces your name
> to lowercase, which is against the normal convention on this list.
>
> I *think* the motivation behind the original .mailmap entry before
> that commit was to upcase the name so it does not stand out oddly
> among other peoples' names, and I am suspecting that cdb6b5ac did
> it in an opposite way by mistake.

Yes, it was a mistake. The motivation was the same as in (94b410bba8 2013-07-12 .mailmap: Map email addresses to names) which did not talk about the whys unfortunately.

The motivation was to get a clearer picture of the git.git developer community. If you ask how many different people actually contributed to git.git, it can be easily answered by counting lines in

    git shortlog -sne

also you would find other interesting data in such a shortlog, both person related data (How much did person X contribute? It's hard to find&compare that if this person contributed via 5 different email addresses)

And other statistics can be learned from a well organized shortlog. I was reading about gits development model and how much the community is involved compared to other projects (I must have been reading The cathedral and the bazaar at the time), so I wanted to find out the ratio between core contributors and community (those who just throw a patch or two over the fence and then move on with life). And specially that question got me into organizing the .mailmap file in the first place.

I am sorry about the mistakes I made back in the time.

Thanks, Stefan

Show 24 quoted lines

>
> Here is a suggested fix; comments?
>
> Thanks.
>
>  .mailmap | 4 ++--
>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/.mailmap b/.mailmap
> index ece2951..8d42ac0 100644
> --- a/.mailmap
> +++ b/.mailmap
> @@ -25,8 +25,8 @@ Ben Walton <bdwalton@gmail.com> <bwalton@artsci.utoronto.ca>
>  Benoit Sigoure <tsunanet@gmail.com> <tsuna@lrde.epita.fr>
>  Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca> <bernt@alumni.uwaterloo.ca>
>  Brandon Casey <drafnel@gmail.com> <casey@nrlssc.navy.mil>
> -brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.ath.cx> Brian M. Carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.ath.cx>
> -brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.ath.cx> <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
> +Brian M. Carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.ath.cx> <sandals@crustytoothpaste.ath.cx>
> +Brian M. Carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.ath.cx> <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
>  Bryan Larsen <bryan@larsen.st> <bryan.larsen@gmail.com>
>  Bryan Larsen <bryan@larsen.st> <bryanlarsen@yahoo.com>
>  Cheng Renquan <crquan@gmail.com>
>