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

[Timothy Arceri]

On 12/12/19 10:38 am, Eric Engestrom wrote:
> 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?

As per my reply to Eric Anholt I'm most concerned about the look of the 
project. IMO contributions with names like Icecream95 or an atom symbol 
just look unprofessional, opensource gets a hard enough time about its 
professionalism as it is without encouraging this. A little common sense 
can go a long way here.

> 
>> 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.