From: Linus Torvalds Date: Sat, 07 Jul 2007 02:54:34 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] Use /etc/mailname for the hostname part of the email address. Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <11837748652889-git-send-email-kraai@ftbfs.org> On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, Matt Kraai wrote: > > From: Matt Kraai > > /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