Re: Git is removing . from the last part of user.name

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 22, 2021, 19:28 UTC
Message-ID: <YSKleNynVrWWyyML@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <YSJuS1OoYsqgpF3j@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>

On Sun, Aug 22, 2021 at 03:33:31PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

Show 30 quoted lines

> On 2021-08-22 at 14:19:33, Daniel P. wrote:
> > If user.name's  value has a . as the last character of the last part
> > of the name, git is removing it from commit operations. But git-config
> > shows the .
> > 
> > example:
> > 
> > in .gitconfig:
> > 
> > [user]
> >     name = Daniel P.
> > 
> > 
> > `git config user.name`:
> > 
> > user.name=Daniel P.
> > 
> > 
> > from `git show`:
> > 
> > Author: Daniel P <danpltile@gmail.com>
> 
> Yes, it does appear we do that.  We consider a period to be "crud" and
> strip off trailing crud.  I think we should probably change that, since
> in some places people write their family name first, and so a name like
> “carlson brian m.” might be a thing people might want to write, in
> addition to this particular case.
> 
> In any event, it's not very polite to "correct" people's names for them.
> I myself have certainly run into that often enough.

A lot of this name-cleanup code came from an era where we were inferring names from gecos fields or from hacky email parsing.

I agree that if somebody has given us a definite name via config, we should mostly leave it intact (the exception being syntactic elements like <>). But we may still want to keep some of the "crud" cleanup when we are pulling from those other sources.

OTOH, this crud stuff goes all the way back to 5e5128ed1c (Remove extraneous ',' ';' and '.' characters from the full name gecos field., 2005-04-17). We warn in pretty big letters these days about pulling an ident from gecos, and our rfc822 parsing is more robust than it once was. So it may be time to just retire most of it. The unfortunate thing is we won't know how many people complain until it's released.

On a somewhat lesser note, I'm tempted to say that "." probably was never that useful (compared to say, comma, which is the gecos separator), and we could probably just drop it from the crud list.

-Peff