[patch] Use /etc/mailname if available

[Jan Hudec]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 23:05:57 -0500, James Blackwell wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 02:42:03AM -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> > 
> > James Blackwell wrote:
> > | I'm in favor of guessing even if wrong. Users don't seem to care much
> > | about the committer field until they get into merging. Once they
> > | get to that point they can fix it then.
> > 
> > I recently had a conversation with someone in IRC who wanted to edit his
> > revisions because they had the wrong committer ID.  I told him 'No!
> > That's forbidden by the model!'  And I got this sense of deja vu, as if
> > I was still working on Arch.
> 
> When I said "fix it then" I meant for new revisions as old revisions tend
> to fade (but not go away) from a log/annotate perspective. You do have me
> leaning in your direction though; as more branches come online, more users
> will ask for this.
> 
> One of my more recent habits is to turn questions like 'NO! You can't do
> that!' into 'how could we do that?' questions. I think there is use in
> trying that here; How can we turn "can't" into "can"?
> 
> I would suppose commiter id was was added to revision id as some sort of
> collision avoidance for the random revids-- even if you and I both struck
> the lottery and generated the same id, we still wouldn't have trouble
> because we have different email addresses.

... and for that purpose it can safely remain ...

> So.. what about taking commiter id out of the revid? Then, we could
> consider making committer id mutable -- perhaps in the same way and tools
> as we're hoping tag will end up being.  While we're at it, why not allow
> for other neat mutable things? Changing committer ids, commit dates,
> appending additional log messages (I would call these annotations, but the
> word means something different).

Well, it can still be used for purpose of revid generation. Bzr just can't
try to extract it from there and consider it valid.

> Sure, there'd be a number of discussions about the merging of this
> metadata, but this is the same converation that one would have with
> revision tags as well.

Yes. That's an interesting point.

One interesting idea would be to have this revision info (committer-id, log,
tags etc) itself versioned.

-- 
						 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb at ucw.cz>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20051221/6d835020/attachment.pgp