Re: Dealing with corporate email recycling

From: Peter Krefting <peter@softwolves.pp.se>
Date: Mar 18, 2022, 21:22 UTC
Message-ID: <e0b85f26-ab5e-b3ae-a2fb-e7d927c46763@softwolves.pp.se>
In-Reply-To: <878rtebxk0.fsf@gmail.com>

On Sat, 12 Mar 2022, Sean Allred wrote:

> We are currently replaying a 15-year SVN history into Git -- with
> contributions from thousands of developers -- and are faced with the
> challenge of corporate email recycling, departures, re-hires, and name
> changes causing identity issues.

I have performed a couple of imports of old version history into Git, from various version control systems, some of them with history dating to before the corporation even had e-mail addresses for employees. In those cases I found that the easiest option was just to use whatever user identification was available in the old version control system -- Git does not explicitely require a valid e-mail address in the author and committer header.

For Subversion import, for instance, I used "Name <login>" where "login" was the Subversion committer ID, and "Name" was from a mapping file I created for the repository. Where records were sketchy and Name information was not available, I would just use "<login>".

When it comes to name changes, I have had scripts map login + date to name. For instance, I changed my last name when I married, so I would have my old (I don't know what the masculine equivalent of "maiden name" is in English) mapped up until a specific date, and my current name afterwards.

-- 
\\// Peter