Users should have full control of their public email id

[Aaron Bentley]

Both Bazaar and debian packaging tools use name+email address combinations as a means of identification. Experience has shown that Bazaar users want control over their email id-- they do not want it autogenerated for them. This is why bzr no longer autogenerates a user ID when none is supplied. Packagers probably want the same thing.

Now that lp:~jtv/launchpad/bug-643345 has landed, Launchpad uses the preferredemail if known, falling back to the noreply address. Both options are wrong: the preferredemail may be private, and even if not private, it may not be the user's desired identity. Silently using a bogus address is also wrong.

Instead, users should be able to select a public email id. Some users will want to use an invalid address in their email id to protect their privacy, so this should not be required to be a valid address (though we should require that it be a well-formed email id).

[Данило Шеган (danilo)]

I am not in complete agreement that this is what we should do for translations. FWIW, the actual producers of the change are people who have done the translations for this particular revision. The actual committer is Launchpad Translations on their and behalf of the person who set up the export.

Considering it's common practice to use revision logs to extract contributor information, it might actually be a better idea to use the real people doing the contribution in appropriate places (i.e. --author), and mark the Launchpad Translations as the 'committer'.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

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On 09/27/2010 09:58 AM, Данило Шеган wrote:
> I am not in complete agreement that this is what we should do for
> translations. FWIW, the actual producers of the change are people who
> have done the translations for this particular revision. The actual
> committer is Launchpad Translations on their and behalf of the person
> who set up the export.

Software is always committing on your behalf, though, even if it's
because you typed "bzr commit". So yes, I think that a public email id
should be used, and it should be the public email id of the person who
set up the export.

> Considering it's common practice to use revision logs to extract
> contributor information, it might actually be a better idea to use the
> real people doing the contribution in appropriate places (i.e.
> --author), and mark the Launchpad Translations as the 'committer'.

In order to provide accurate attribution of authors, we would need
public email ids for them, since the format is the same as that for
committers.

Aaron
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