Re: Offer of help with move to git

["Eric S. Raymond" <esr at thyrsus dot com>]

Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>:
> * Eric S. Raymond:
> 
> > Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>:
> >> Thanks for your offer for working on this.  (I actually brought up
> >> your name at the Cauldron. :)
> >> 
> >> Can your tools handle changes in preferred email addresses over time?
> >
> > It would in theory be possible to do this with multiple applications
> > of the reposurgeon "authors read" command using different map files
> > and applied to date-bounded spans of revisions. So, yes, my tools
> > could handle this case just fine.
> >
> > In practice, nobody has ever wanted to actually try this.  The
> > complexity overhead of deciding when an address should change would be
> > high, and doing so would destroy a useful property these user IDs
> > normally have, which is to imply a 1-1 map between IDs and committers
> > (for searchability).
> 
> Okay, it's not a big deal for me if my older contributions are
> attributed to Red Hat.  I was just wondering.

I understand.  It will not and should not be up to me to decide how
that's done.  I'm just providing tools and expertise - your
"Mr. Inside", the lead on the conversion, will make the policy
decisions. If that person decides to try this, I can support it.

One way to do it would be to mine the list archives for not just names
but name-date pairs. With a little scripting work that could be processed
into a sequence of map files, each one valid for a known span of dates.  The
only assumption required is that an email address is valid for a person
until explicitly superseded by a different address in the archive.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>