Re: email address handling

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Aug 1, 2008, 19:34 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0808011229400.3277@nehalem.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080731194042.a1534b4d.akpm@linux-foundation.org>

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> 
> A minor thing.
> 
> Commit 76ecb4f2d7ea5c3aac8970b9529775316507c6d2 is displayed thusly:
> 
>   commit 76ecb4f2d7ea5c3aac8970b9529775316507c6d2
>   Author: Zhang, Rui <rui.zhang@intel.com>
>   Date:   Thu Apr 10 16:20:23 2008 +0800
> 
>       ACPI: update thermal temperature
> 
> but that isn't a valid email address.  Because it contains a comma it
> must be quoted:  "Zhang, Rui".

The email address is rui.zhang@intel.com.

The name is Zhang, Rui.

Git at no point ever mixes the two up. It's _not_ one field ("Zhang, Rui <rui.zhang@intel.com>"), it's literally two different parts that you set separately, that just get shown (and encoded in the commit, for that matter) in a way that resembles a single email address.

> I assume that something in the git toolchain removed his quotes, and
> that was arguably incorrect.

No, it would be incorrect to keep them, because the name doesn't contain the quotes. The name is just that

	Zhang, Rui

part.

I've considered having the email->name detection change "A, B" into "B A", but it's not always right, so it doesn't try to munge the names it finds in other ways except to remove obvious crud from the ends.

And Andrew, this is true of Signed-off-by: lines too, btw. If you actually want to send emails to them, _then_ you need to add quotes to follow the email rules.

		Linus