Re: [PATCH] Use /etc/mailname for the hostname part of the email address.

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jul 7, 2007, 02:54 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0707061945220.31544@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <11837748652889-git-send-email-kraai@ftbfs.org>

On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, Matt Kraai wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> From: Matt Kraai <kraai@asturias.ftbfs.org>
> 
> /etc/mailname contains the hostname to be used on outgoing email
> messages generated locally on Debian systems

I think this is taking us into a bad direction.

The thing is, I actually personally tend to _prefer_ the committer name as being "user@hostname" rather than a "real" email address.

It often tells you something much more.

For example, take a look at the kernel archive, and do

	git log --author=torvalds

and notice how the exact author string changes - not just because "osdl.org" became "linux-foundation.org", but because it ends up encoding which *machine* I did things on.

For example, while I do almost all my work at any time on my "main" machine (right now "woody" - not because I'm horny, but because it's an Intel woodcrest machine, the way my previous main machine was called "g5" because it was an IBM PowerPC G5 machine), but I sometimes do things on another machine because that's the machine that showed the problem, or was the machine that it got tested on (32-bit x86 things: "macmini" or "evo"), or it was just the laptop I use while travelling ("evo" again).

IOW, I don't think the authorship really even _has_ to be seen as a "real email" address. The "user@hostname" in many ways is nicer. Sure, when the patches come in as emails (which ends up being most of them), it obviously ends up being the email, but I don't think that's at all required.

If you actually want to contact the people involved with a patch, you should use the "Signed-off-by:" and "Cc:" lines in the commit message, not necessarily the author thing!

			Linus