Hi, Eric, Von: Eric S. Raymond [mailto:e...@thyrsus.com] > > As the author of reposurgeon - which can edit old commits in multiple > VCSes - I've probably heard more about the use cases for this ability than > anyone else. Patching committers' past email addresses is not one of them, > though I have done that incidentally during a few repository lifts. > > I think this tells us that, at least among the committer population > associated with well-established projects, stable email addresses are the > norm.
I used to commit for PostGIS a long time ago, from two different jobs. Both companies had the policy that I had to use the official company mail address when contributing to free software projects. So when I switched to the other company, I had to use the other mail address. Still, my login id for the PostGIS SVN repository stayed the same (while I had to re-subscribe the mailing lists.) Simply, nobody cared to update old commit messages, mailing list archives etc. where the old address was still mentioned. And I don't think that People like Linus Thorvalds will rebase the Linux kernel when, say, Alan Cox changes his employer - the maintainers file will be updated, and the new commits will come with the new user ID. So I'm not sure that a globally unique, immutable ID for attribution is really needed. I do agree, however, that globally unique, immutable IDs for login may be useful. But my guess is that this is already supported, at least when using Apache authentication. Best regards Markus Schaber CODESYS(r) a trademark of 3S-Smart Software Solutions GmbH Inspiring Automation Solutions 3S-Smart Software Solutions GmbH Dipl.-Inf. Markus Schaber | Product Development Core Technology Memminger Str. 151 | 87439 Kempten | Germany Tel. +49-831-54031-979 | Fax +49-831-54031-50 E-Mail: m.scha...@codesys.com | Web: http://www.codesys.com CODESYS internet forum: http://forum.codesys.com Managing Directors: Dipl.Inf. Dieter Hess, Dipl.Inf. Manfred Werner | Trade register: Kempten HRB 6186 | Tax ID No.: DE 167014915
