Re: Deadname rewriting

[Phil Hord <phil.hord@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 1:19 AM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
<avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 15 2019, Phil Hord wrote:
>
> > At $work we have a long time employee who has changed their name from
> > Alice to Bob.  Bob doesn't want anyone to call him "Alice" anymore and
> > is prone to be offended if they do.  This is called "deadnaming".
...
> What should be done is to extend the .mailmap support to other
> cases. I.e. make tools like blame, shortlog etc. show the equivalent of
> %aN and %aE by default.

It seems that shortlog and blame do use %aE and %aN by default.  Even
log does.  It is only because I didn't know about %aN 10 years ago
that my custom log format does not.

It's a pity the format author has the option to ignore the mailmap. I
think it's a choice commonly made by mistake rather than intention.  I
wonder if anyone would mind a forced-override config.  Maybe a force
flag in the .mailmap file itself.

           <cto@company.xx>                       <cto@coompany.xx>
           Other Author <other@author.xx>   nick2 <bugs@company.xx>
           Alice Doe <alice.doe@myco.com>         <bob.doe@myco.co>  --force


> This topic was discussed at the last git contributor summit (brought up
> by CB Bailey) resulting in this patch, which I see didn't make it in &
> needs to be resurrected again:
> https://public-inbox.org/git/20181212171052.13415-1-cb@hashpling.org/

Thanks for the link.

I didn't know about config options for mailmap.file and log.mailmap
before. These do make this option much more useful, especially when we
can insert default settings for them into /etc/gitconfig across the
company.