[darcs-users] changing an author

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Clive" == Clive Crous <clive at darkarts.co.za> writes:

    Clive> a patch was sent to me (unified diff) by a 3rd party
    Clive> once-off contributer.  I applied it to my repository with
    Clive> the author set to that author's email.  I have since been
    Clive> contacted and asked to remove the email address from
    Clive> 'public display', that is: he want's his email removed from
    Clive> the patch within the darcs repo.

    Clive> What is the 'sanest' way to go about doing this?

There is no 'sane' way in general.  Catering to these requests
basically means that you need to ask each and every contributor in
advance how they want their contributions acknowledged.
Alternatively, you can refuse to acknowledge their contributions.  I
think those are unreasonable burdens to impose on the rest of the
world when throwaway email addresses are so cheap and easy to acquire.

As you're aware, it's not just you, it's everybody who has already
pulled that patch from your repo.

    Clive> I have unpulled the patches from the live repo for now, but
    Clive> unrecording/re-recording seems silly to me

Why?  If you do it quickly, it's trivial (and the darcs amend-record
command is supplied for this kind of thing).  Doing it any other way
is impossible, we hope (else the hash algorithm used to give patches
their unique names is far too weak).

    Clive> and might cause issues for people who have already pulled
    Clive> those two patches.

Indeed it will.  Besides the certain conflicts they'll run into the
next time they pull from your repository, if for some reason they
should publish their repositories, they will be subject to the same
unreasonable demands, with even less justice than in your case.


-- 
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