Merge duplicate contributors 👤👤👤👤

[o2sh]

Since @yoichi's PR #243: we identify each contributor by their email address instead of their username which is definitely the right solution. However in some cases, a user may have changed his GH email along the way and therefore appear twice - or more - in the Authors section:

It may be a good idea to have a second pass in get_authors and merge the lines that share the same username.to_lowercase()

[HallerPatrick]

Sounds like a good idea to me.I would be interested in doing this. @o2sh is it still open?

[o2sh]

It's all yours 👍

[HallerPatrick]

@o2sh While currently working on this, I am asking myself, why it is the better way to identify by email in the first place and not the username, when only the email can change and not the username? Or am I missing something?

[o2sh]

You can actually also change your GitHub username, even though it's less common.

The username/email that appear in the git log (and parsed by onefetch) are taken from the .gitconfig, so if your SSH key is properly configured: you can actually put whatever you want in their and still be able to push to your repository, - or in HTTPS, if you login with username/password. On GitHub, each commit is linked to an account based solely on its email adress(es).

I agree that merging based on the email seems arbitrary but so it is if we would have chosen the username: both give unsatisfactory results. Hence the second pass.

[HallerPatrick]

Alrighty, that seems reasonable 👍

[HallerPatrick]

Made a pull request. It is still not perfect, because there are also commits with a different username and email. We would have to make guesses, if they are the same person, where I would refrain from...

[yoichi]

Git has a mechanism for identifying users by .mailmap file. Is that not enough?
https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmailmap

[o2sh]

To be honest, I wasn't even aware that Git provided such a mechanism.

For repositories that do provide this file, this would definitely solve our issue. Git2 seems to provide bindings to take advantage of Mailmap.

Maybe, we should explore that solution, it may result in a cleaner logic and prevent us from making any wrong assumptions on whether or not an entry is a duplicate.

What do you think @HallerPatrick @yoichi @spenserblack

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Some repositories using .mailmap: linux, react, tokei, zulip