Unable to contact committer

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Joris Putcuyps wrote:
> Hello
> 
> When a person commits changes, bzr attaches the committer's id.
> When this person changes his email address, all past commits have
> useless contact information!
> 
> How can I prevent this?
> (Perhaps a separation of contacts and bzr tree, or version controlled
> contacts)
> 
> Thx
> 
> Joris

Interesting thought.

I would certainly argue that the past commit information isn't
"useless". The email address is really just a hint (it certainly doesn't
ever have to be a valid email address).

We have discussed being able to have extra information about revisions,
which can be modified after the fact. We've avoided them to this point,
because it adds one more layer of potential indirection and confusion.

I think the easiest way to do something like this, is to just have an
AUTHORS file, which gets version controlled along with everything else.
And then you can have aliases for the same person. For example:


Martin Pool   mbp at sourcefrog.net
	aka   martin.pool at canonical.com
John A Meinel john at arbash-meinel.com
	aka   john at johnmeinel.com
...

Also, with a person's name, and an old email address, it would be fairly
reasonable to do a web search for them, and see if you can get a newer
contact address. So I wouldn't consider the information to ever be
useless. But certainly *less* useful if they change their email address.

John
=:->

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