[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #61864: Meta: Ascribe commits to the proper person and name.

[WordPress Trac]

#61864: Meta: Ascribe commits to the proper person and name.
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 Reporter:  dmsnell         |      Owner:  (none)
     Type:  defect (bug)    |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal          |  Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  Administration  |    Version:  trunk
 Severity:  normal          |   Keywords:
  Focuses:                  |
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 Many commits in `git` end up with invalid committer information, be it the
 name, email, or both. This happens for a number of reasons.

  - The committer has changed their name.
  - The committer has changed their email or used a different one in the
 past.
  - An automated system recorded the wrong email address.
  - The username mapping script from `subversion` double-encodes the UTF-8
 bytes of a committer's name from `profiles.wordpress.org` and corrupts
 names with non-US-ASCII characters.

 This obscures authorship for the affected commmitters and may erroneously
 maintain the wrong attribution for their work, even perpetuating names
 they have chosen to change.

 While the record in `subversion` only reports usernames it does not have
 this problem, but the `git` side communicates identity and should either
 be fixed or have a mechanism to resolve these issues.

 `git` itself offers one way to fix this via the `.mailmap` command, which
 I propose introducing into the repo. This file allows a `git` repository
 to hold a list of aliases for names and emails such that all commits
 attributed to any of the aliases resolves to the preferred identity. This
 provides control to each committer over their own representation, and
 fixes a number of software mistakes the cloud the history.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/61864>
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