Re: What's cooking in git.git (Jan 2021, #02; Fri, 8)

Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com> writes:

I have seen that "ID", which doesn't have permanent association to <name, email>, has been raised as a solution from time to time, but I am not quite sure what problem is being solved. At some point, you'd need to translate the "ID" to a way humans use to refer to each other---you cannot forever be saying "Ah, commits by this contributor #70763 is consistently good and seems to know the history traversal quite well. We wish who it is so that we can ask to review what we have been working on."

So we must have a mapping from ID to <name, email> or something. How is that mapping maintained? Even though Git is a version tracking system and the mapping will change over time, we'll only keep the "latest"? That may not work very well, as a work for hire contract a company made with one of the project participants would have been made with a real person with a name, not just an anonymous contributor #70763---the work done under the contract would not become invalid merely because mapping from ID to <name, email> changes, and those who made contract with a person with a certain name would want to make sure the contributor #70763 who made the work is actually who they thought they had contract with.

If we do not keep track of the change of the mapping ourselves, the ecosystem around us will start doing so to fill the gap, so I do not think use of "ID" would help you dissociate from your past self, while keeping the credit for your past commits.

And if the mapping is version controlled in such a way that an "ID" can be used to look up its name at any given time in the past, it would not be so different from what we already have.

One advantage I could imagine that "ID" based system may have is that one who wants to completely dissociate from an older name and/or email can just start using a totally different "ID" with totally different name, and pretend that s/he has no relationship with the old person associated with the old "ID", and nobody would be able to tell. But again, I suspect that it can also be done without "ID". So...

I personally think having "author" is a mistake, iff some people do not like "limited to a single author". You can write everybody's name in the trailer as "Co-Authored-by:" and at that point you do not need any author in the commit object header.

But that is so miniscule a feature that I do not think it is worth making a backward incompatible change to change the number of the commit object header for the author from 1 to either 0 or many.

Anyway, thanks for an opportunity for a (somewhat) fun thought experiment.

Goodnight.