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From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox•com>
To: Sean Allred <allred.sean@gmail•com>
Cc: git@vger•kernel.org, sallred@epic•com, grmason@epic•com,
	sconrad@epic•com
Subject: Re: Dealing with corporate email recycling
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2022 16:03:35 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <xmqq4k42n2g8.fsf@gitster.g> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <878rtebxk0.fsf@gmail.com> (Sean Allred's message of "Sat, 12 Mar 2022 16:38:56 -0600")

Sean Allred <allred.sean@gmail•com> writes:

> As a baseline, we know the following statements are true:
>
>   1. A person's preferred name can change at any time.
>   2. A person's preferred email can change at any time.
>   3. Neither of these pieces of information are necessarily
>      identifying in a given codebase.

Another thing we know is

    4. People know that old e-mail addresses stay in archives and
       address books of people, and find it wise to avoid reusing an
       address somebody else (especially well-known ones) has been
       using, so that they do not get e-mails from total strangers
       and having to tell them that the intended recipient does not
       read the mailbox anymore.

>   1. Do nothing.  Leave it to the developer to determine the correct
>      contact information without assistance.
>
>      This doesn't really resolve the confusion, but it is technically
>      an option.
>
>   2. Use gitmailmap(5) functionality to resolve historical emails to
>      primary emails.
>
>      Sadly this doesn't actually solve the email recycling problem.
>      Since one email could be used by multiple developers, there's no
>      way (that I can see) to use a single mailmap file to resolve one
>      of these emails to a single person.


GNU arch (tla) had an interesting idea around this area and used
combination of time and e-mail address to identify a person.
one@corp--$date referred to the person who had control of the
address on the specified date, where $date can be abbreviated to
2022 or 202201 to mean 20220101.

The mailmap allows "Name e-mail" or "e-mail" to be mapped to
canonical "Name e-mail", but we should be able to coax "valid time
range" information encoded in each entry of the .mailmap format,
i.e. "if you see 'Name e-mail' between time X and Y, map that to...".


  reply	other threads:[~2022-03-13  0:03 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 28+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2022-03-12 22:38 Dealing with corporate email recycling Sean Allred
2022-03-13  0:03 ` Junio C Hamano [this message]
2022-03-13  0:26   ` rsbecker
2022-03-13 14:01     ` Sean Allred
2022-03-13 14:20       ` rsbecker
2022-03-13 14:41         ` Sean Allred
2022-03-13 15:02           ` rsbecker
2022-03-13 15:21             ` Sean Allred
2022-03-13 19:57               ` Philip Oakley
2022-03-13 22:40                 ` Sean Allred
2022-03-13 23:16                   ` Junio C Hamano
2022-03-13 23:23                     ` rsbecker
2022-03-14  0:19                       ` Junio C Hamano
2022-03-14 11:56                     ` Philip Oakley
2022-03-14 21:24                       ` Junio C Hamano
2022-03-14 22:25                         ` Philip Oakley
2022-03-15  1:23                       ` Sean Allred
2022-03-15 11:15                         ` Philip Oakley
2022-03-13 12:20 ` Philip Oakley
2022-03-13 13:35   ` Sean Allred
2022-03-14 11:59     ` Philip Oakley
2022-03-13 15:51 ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2022-03-13 17:22 ` brian m. carlson
2022-03-13 17:52   ` rsbecker
2022-03-13 19:47     ` rsbecker
2022-03-13 22:23       ` Sean Allred
2022-03-15  1:27 ` Sean Allred
2022-03-18 21:22 ` Peter Krefting

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