Re: [PATCH/RFC 1/4] contrib: add git-contacts helper

> Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> writes:
>
>>> The author name and email can be grabbed from the "blame" output
>>> without doing this (and the result may be more robust), but you
>>> would need to read from the log message anyway, so I think this is
>>> OK.
>>>
>>> Note that the names and emails in blame output are sanitized via the
>>> mailmap mechanism, but "cat-file commit" will certainly not be.
>>
>> Thanks for pointing this out. Grabbing the author name and email from
>> git-blame output does seem like a better approach.
>
> Well, that was not what I was suggesting.  Reading from blame output
> will map only the author/committer names/addresses, and you have two
> choices:
>
>  (1) if you read author/committer from blame output and other names
>      from the commit object without applying mailmap, the same
>      person can appear under different names, from his authorship
>      (mapped name) and from his name on footers (unmapped), which
>      would be inconsistent.  By reading from "author" and
>      "committer" header lines in the commit object, you will be at
>      least consistently using unmapped names.
>
>  (2) if you want to apply mailmap to names you collect by reading
>      the footer, you will write the mapping logic yourself anyway,
>      and at that point, passing the names you collect by reading the
>      "author" and "committer" header lines in the commit object to
>      the same logic will give you mapped names. At that point, you
>      do not gain much by reading names from the blame output.
>
> So in either case, you would be better off not reading the
> author/committer from blame output, as long as you need to pick up
> other names from the commit object payload.