Subject: Re: RFD: fast-import is picky with author names (and maybe it should - but how much so?)

From: Michael J Gruber <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2012 18:28:18 +0100

Felipe Contreras venit, vidit, dixit 09.11.2012 15:34:
> On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Michael J Gruber
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
>> Hg seems to store just anything in the author field ("committer"). The
>> various interfaces that are floating around do some behind-the-back
>> conversion to git format. The more conversions they do, the better they
>> seem to work (no erroring out) but I'm wondering whether it's really a
>> good thing, or whether we should encourage a more diligent approach
>> which requires a user to map non-conforming author names wilfully.
> 
> So you propose that when somebody does 'git clone hg::hg hg-git' the
> thing should fail. I hope you don't think it's too unbecoming for me
> to say that I disagree.

There is no need to disagree with a proposal I haven't made. I would
disagree with the proposal that I haven't made, too.

> IMO it should be git fast-import the one that converts these bad
> authors, not every single tool out there. Maybe throw a warning, but
> that's all. Or maybe generate a list of bad authors ready to be filled
> out. That way when a project is doing a real conversion, say, when
> moving to git, they can run the conversion once and see which authors
> are bad and not multiple times, each try taking longer than the next.

As Jeff pointed out, git-fast-import expects output conforming to a
certain standard, and that's not going to change. import is agnostic to
where its import stream is coming from. Only the producer of that stream
can have additional information about the provenience of the stream's
data which may aid (possibly together with user input or choices) in
transforming that into something conforming.

Michael