Re: What's in a name? Let's use a (uuid,name,email) triplet

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Mar 19, 2010, 00:50 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1003181739310.18017@i5.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <9e4733911003181739m2f605dd7g9406aaecc296749f@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Jon Smirl wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> 
> I had all of the names in the list so that I could regenerate the list
> and diff it against the old version to know which new names needed to
> be checked. Looking back I could have eliminated the names without
> errors and then added a comment to the file as to the last date all of
> the names were checked.  But that is less reliable than recording
> which were checked. The problem is that if you lose track of what has
> been checked, you are forced to recheck everything and it takes a long
> time to recheck everything.

The part you keep missing is that NOBODY CARES!

For example, I exist in the current git kernel tree with 11 different names for just the authorship information:

     32 Linus Torvalds torvalds@evo.osdl.org
   1522 Linus Torvalds torvalds@g5.osdl.org
   4194 Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org
      7 Linus Torvalds torvalds@macmini.osdl.org
      2 Linus Torvalds torvalds@merom.osdl.org
      8 Linus Torvalds torvalds@osdl.org
    166 Linus Torvalds torvalds@ppc970.osdl.org
      4 Linus Torvalds torvalds@ppc970.osdl.org.(none)
      1 Linus Torvalds torvalds@quad.osdl.org
   1606 Linus Torvalds torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org
    174 Linus Torvalds torvalds@woody.osdl.org

(that's counts, in case you care). And then if you check signed-off lines, you'll find some _additional_ oddities where things just got misspelled, like

	Linus Torvalds <tovalds@linux-foundation.org>
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@akpm@linux-foundation.org>

where in one case there's a missing 'r', and in the other it's some odd perverse incestuous relationship between me and Andrew (in reality, it's me doing a stupid "search-and-replace" on the emails, adding my own sign-off to Andrew's and that got a bit too much copy-paste issues)

There's a few other mistakes like that in the sign-offs.

Does anybody care? Certainly not I. There is absolutely zero reason to worry about it. I used to find it convenient to see what machines I had worked on, so I actually included that. And one of them was clearly mis-configured, or git did something wrong when the hostname was already in FQDN format. Whatever.

There is no real _value_ in making a .mailcap for each such buggy entry is what I'm trying to tell you. Those things are maybe used for statistics. On the whole, they are correct.

			Linus