Repository for the conversion machinery

[Jeff Law]

On 09/16/2015 09:26 AM, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> On 15 September 2015 at 21:36, Frank Ch. Eigler <fche@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>>> cagney = Andrew Cagney <cagney@redhat.com>
>>> cagney@gnu.org?
>>
>> Good point.  The email identities of people change over time; forcing
>> a single arbitrary one to label all contributions is at best imprecise
>> and at worse a miscrediting.  (This is one way in which the impersonal
>> USERID@gcc.gnu.org aliases work better.)
>
> It strikes me as the least bad and quickest option.  It also best
> reflects how CVS and SVN deal with identities.
> (Would it go hand-in-hand with a git commit hook ensuring that future
> commits preserve this convention?  Just asking)
>
> Two other options come to mind:
>
> - preserve history
>
> That is create a repo that gives the appearance that we had git all
> along.   It would be high quality, useful, and most git-like; and also
> one hell of a lot of work :-/   For instance, it might include commits
> by:
>    Andrew Cagney  <cagney@highland.com.au>
>    Andrew Cagney  <cagney@b1.cygnus.com>
>    Andrew Cagney  <ac131313@redhat.com>
>    Andrew Cagney  <cagney@gnu.org>
> While they are all the same individual, they reflect different points
> in time.   If we'd had git all along then this, I believe, is what the
> repository would have contained. There would certainly be no
> expectation that 20 year old addresses were still valid, or that they
> need "fixing".
So true, but as you note, it'd probably be a ton of additional work to 
preserve that level of history.


>
> - rewrite history - use some totally arbitrary, and quickly outdated,
> internet identity
I think this is main reason why @gnu.org or @gmail.com style addresses 
are preferred over employer addresses when there's > 1 address on file.

Jeff

ps.  Good to hear from you...  It's been a long time.