AW: RFC: simple proposal for Internet-scoped IDs

Hi, Eric,

Von: Eric S. Raymond [mailto:esr_at_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

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Received on 2012-12-05 11:45:14 CET