Anonymous contributions

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On dinsdag 16 april 2019 21:38:04 CEST Ben Cooksley wrote:

> This hook was implemented in the first place to ensure that people had
> correctly setup Git on their local machine.
> 
> On some versions of Git (maybe all?) it will automatically use the local
> user account name as the name.
> 
> This leads to people committing as "me", "user" and "nobody" without
> meaning to, but which still leads to a situation in which the metadata of a
> commit has ended up being useless.
> 
> I'd rather maintain a small list of exceptions for those who do have names
> without a space in them to ensure that for the vast majority of our users
> do correctly get informed they need to fix their local setup.

You could do a small blacklist of known wrong names like the ones you cite -- but you will never be able to implement a hook that identifies a string as a name correctly. I'm sorry -- but it's just impossible. 

It's also just not good manners to tell people their name isn't a real name: and I think that allowing ourselves to accept every name except for things like me, user, nobody, admin, root is more important than making sure we've got correct metadata. 

Because none of us can actually be sure the metadata is correct anyway: there's not just the impossibility of creating that identifies a string as a name correctly, humans cannot do that either.

If we've got a working email address, well, that's the main thing. People's names aren't unique, validatable or useful as identifiers in any case.
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