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

[Eric Engestrom]

On 2019-12-11 at 23:46, Timothy Arceri <tarceri at itsqueeze.com> wrote:
> 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.

If you want to ask someone to provide a real name if you think they didn't I definitely agree,
and if you want to document that we want real names I'm also ok with that,
but all I'm saying is that you can't *require* it because there's no reliable way
to enforce that.

> 
> > 
> >> 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.
>