Re: Dealing with corporate email recycling
- From
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
- Date
- Mar 13, 2022, 00:03 UTC
- Message-ID
- <xmqq4k42n2g8.fsf@gitster.g>
- In-Reply-To
- <878rtebxk0.fsf@gmail.com>
Sean Allred <allred.sean@gmail.com> writes:
Show 6 quoted lines
> As a baseline, we know the following statements are true: > > 1. A person's preferred name can change at any time. > 2. A person's preferred email can change at any time. > 3. Neither of these pieces of information are necessarily > identifying in a given codebase.
Another thing we know is
4. People know that old e-mail addresses stay in archives and
address books of people, and find it wise to avoid reusing an
address somebody else (especially well-known ones) has been
using, so that they do not get e-mails from total strangers
and having to tell them that the intended recipient does not
read the mailbox anymore.Show 13 quoted lines
> 1. Do nothing. Leave it to the developer to determine the correct > contact information without assistance. > > This doesn't really resolve the confusion, but it is technically > an option. > > 2. Use gitmailmap(5) functionality to resolve historical emails to > primary emails. > > Sadly this doesn't actually solve the email recycling problem. > Since one email could be used by multiple developers, there's no > way (that I can see) to use a single mailmap file to resolve one > of these emails to a single person.
GNU arch (tla) had an interesting idea around this area and used combination of time and e-mail address to identify a person. one@corp--$date referred to the person who had control of the address on the specified date, where $date can be abbreviated to 2022 or 202201 to mean 20220101.
The mailmap allows "Name e-mail" or "e-mail" to be mapped to canonical "Name e-mail", but we should be able to coax "valid time range" information encoded in each entry of the .mailmap format, i.e. "if you see 'Name e-mail' between time X and Y, map that to...".