Subject: Re: What's in a name? Let's use a (uuid,name,email) triplet

From: Paolo Bonzini <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:34:39 +0100

On 03/18/2010 10:57 PM, Michael Witten wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 16:39, Martin Langhoff
> <[email-masked]>  wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Michael Witten<[email-masked]>  wrote:
>>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 16:19, Martin Langhoff
>>>> What's the value? For me it'll be "Martin Langhoff". I already have that.
>>>
>>> Well, that's rather egotistical considering you're probably not the
>>> only Martin Langhoff in this world. I'd advocate something like
>>> "Martin Langhoff<[email-masked]>".
>>
>> So you are saying we should change the core datamodel of git to say...
>> what we already can say?
>
> You see, Martin, you might want/need to stop using "Martin Langhoff
> <[email-masked]>" as your email account, but there's no
> reason why you can't continue to use it for your UUID.

While a gnu.org or gmail.com will (most likely) stay with some person 
forever, hindsight is 20/20 and many people may generate his UUID from a 
work email.  So, suppose I make my UUID based on <[email-masked]> 
what will guarantee that in 20 years I won't find a new career as a 
bartender, and Red Hat wouldn't hire someone with my same name, and give 
him the same email address?

Heck, some people use gmail only for their personal email, and they 
rightly cannot be bothered to create another account to solve a problem 
they don't understand and they probably do not have.

For the UUID to make sense, it would need to be what the acronym says: 
universally unique.  An SHA-1 value is _not_ universally unique, it is 
just a one-way function.  There are tons of git repos out there with a 
blob hashing to e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391 or 
257cc5642cb1a054f08cc83f2d943e56fd3ebe99.

I have an idea.  Start your own website uuidemail.com.  One registers 
and gets an alias for their email, something like 
[email-masked].  Then people can 
start using 
[email-masked] 
as their git user.email.  I bet nobody will.

Paolo

ps: Yes, in a perfect world it would be nice for people to know that I 
am the same person independent of whether I contribute as 
[email-masked] or [email-masked].  But we're not in a perfect 
world, so amen.