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Users should be able to change their associated data

Open
#50 2 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@ajdlinux is already working on this.

Since Nov 27, 2019.

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This issue has not been assessed yet.

Description

enhancement

Users should be able to change their associated data, like name and email, and not be stuck with one name forever. I'm quoting some bits here with a few comments on my own:

To try and put it simply, the author of a commit is tied in to the identity of the commit itself. If you change the author, it’s treated as an entirely new commit. Anyone who has grabbed a copy of your original commit and made subsequent changes on top of it finds themselves orphaned from the history of the project. To use a crude analogy, it’s like you rip the trunk of a tree out, while the branches are magically left hanging in the air, connected to nothing and isolated.

Of course, it’s not that the designers of Git tried to make it difficult for committers to change their names. It’s likely that most of them just didn’t think about what would happen if a developer needed to change their name retroactively, because most of the people who have worked on Git are cis men. They aren’t expected to change their names if and when they get married or divorced, and having cis privilege, they don’t need to change their name to something more consistent with their gender. Nevertheless, the inability to change one’s name retroactively without disrupting others’ work can mean that trans people — particularly trans women, who are likely to face harsh social stigma in any space where their trans history is known — will have to cease to contribute to their projects when they transition.

*additions by ng0:
Additionally this means that if your project has an open policy on names and you decide to change your name you will be stuck in the patchworks interface with the old name. In my case as I do not want to use my legal name due to personal reasons,it created this situation:
before signing up at patchwork, the authors name was "ng0".
Then I signed up, the process was unclear to me so I chose "non" "such" thinking i could change it later on.. after signing up I am now stuck with "non such".

I had no chance to test this myself, but you should also be aware of names which differ from the first+lastname form.

References: #49 and https://libreboot.org/git/#guidelines

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