Re: [Contrib PATCH] Add scripts to convert GCC repo from SVN to Git

[Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>]

On Wed, 5 Jun 2019, Jason Merrill wrote:

> > I think failing to credit (by name and email address) the person implied
> > by the commit metadata, in the absence of positive evidence (such as a
> > ChangeLog entry) for the change being authored by someone else, is just
> > wrong, in the same way it's wrong not to use --author when committing for
> > someone else in git.
> 
> It's wrong, but it's not importantly wrong.

I think it's importantly wrong not to have a name and email address for 
the committer in the absence of using such information for the author.  
(Whereas if the name or email address refer to the right person but are 
anachronistic for that commit, that's what I'd consider not importantly 
wrong.)

> For email addresses, I think that using @gcc.gnu.org would be the best
> approach for people that have such accounts, rather than an employer address
> from an arbitrary point in time.

I'm fine with use of @gcc.gnu.org (used together with a name for the 
person in question that is or was valid, at or after the time of some 
commit they made) for committers who in fact do have or did have such an 
address (as opposed to inventing such addresses for committers from the 
gcc2 era who never had such addresses, or anyone who only committed in the 
egcs.cygnus.com era and who no longer had an account by the time of the 
move to gcc.gnu.org).

When the commit adds a ChangeLog entry and thus contains contemporaneous 
information about the preferred name and email address for the author at 
that time, I think using that information (via the reposurgeon 
"changelogs" feature) is preferable to a generic author map entry (thus, 
the author map entries should be considered a fallback for those commits 
that didn't add a ChangeLog entry (or added one with bad syntax for which 
parsing fails, etc.)).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com