[Mesa-dev] Requiring a full author name when contributing to mesa?

[Eric Engestrom]

On 2019-12-11 at 23:09, Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 2:35 PM Timothy Arceri <tarceri at itsqueeze.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > So it seems lately we have been increasingly merging patches with made
> > up names, or single names etc [1]. The latest submitted patch has the
> > name Icecream95. This seems wrong to me from a point of keeping up the
> > integrity of the project. I'm not a legal expert but it doesn't seem
> > ideal to be amassing commits with these type of author tags from that
> > point of view either.
> >
> > Is it just me or do others agree we should at least require a proper
> > name on the commits (as fake as that may be also)? Seems like a low bar
> > to me.
> 
> I'm of the opinion that in fact all names are made up,

Whole heartedly agreed.

Remember that many different cultures exist, and they have different customs
around names. As an example, a teacher of mine had a single name, but the school
required two separate "first name" and "last name" fields so he wrote his name twice,
which appeared on every form we got from the school, yet everyone knew he didn't
have what we called a "last name"/"family name".
Another example is people from Asia who often assume a made up Western-sounding
pseudonym to use when communicating with Western people, and those often don't
look like real names to us.

What looks like a real name to you?
How would you even start to define such a rule?

> and we don't
> want to be getting into the business of requiring legal names for
> committing.  If legal names were what you were getting at: have you
> checked the legal names of your fellow contributors match what they're
> contributing under?
> 
> I don't know what legal risk you might be thinking of, that seems like
> spreading fear for no reason to me.