Git conversion: fixing email addresses from ChangeLog files

[Joseph Myers]

On Sat, 28 Dec 2019, Segher Boessenkool wrote:

> > This is about extracting attributions from changelogs when unambiguous 
> > there, and then correcting mistakes or otherwise making minor variants 
> > more uniform.
> 
> Yes, and I'm saying you probably shouldn't do that.

Extracting attributions from ChangeLog files is clearly useful to 
attribute changes committed by someone other than their author, and to 
provide more precise attributions in the cases where someone was 
committing under multiple email addresses to distinguish the affiliation 
relevant for each commit.

> Note that these errors did not exist in the changelog in the commit
> message, for example.

Mostly the changelogs in the commit message don't give the author email at 
all (or if they do, it's because they've cut-and-pasted the complete 
ChangeLog entry from one place to another, so with the same typos).

> Since people very often typo their own name (as the evidence shows), the
> heuristic for deriving it should be robust against that.

I think Richard's heuristic for finding cases of typos and proposing fixes 
for them (then to be applied automatically, after adjusting the preferred 
version in cases where comments such as Jakub's indicate something other 
than the most common version is to be preferred) looks robust to me.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm@polyomino.org.uk