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

[Daniel Stone]

On Wed, 11 Dec 2019 at 22:35, Timothy Arceri <tarceri at itsqueeze.com> wrote:
> 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.

What benefit does it bring?

Icecream95 could just resubmit as 'John Johnson'; would we just take
that as face value that that was their 'real name' and accept the
contribution?

I know someone in Australia who changed their name via deed poll to
Stormy Wrathcauser (changed slightly to protect their privacy, but
very close). Would we accept their contribution if they posted, or
would we have to stop and take measures to verify that that was their
real legal name?

What about Chinese contributors, who as noted in thread tend to use
made-up non-legal pseudonyms anyway?

Unless we're actually trying to bring up and enforce a web of trust, I
don't think there's any point in requiring that the submitter's name
conforms to some notion of idealised naming - it's just window
dressing. I also don't see any point in trying to enforce a web of
trust. Debian's method of doing this involves a hundred people
standing around in a room looking at drivers' licenses from countries
they might not have even heard of before to verify identity. But I'm
certainly not an expert at identifying whether or not a Bolivian
drivers' license which is put in front of my face is forged or not,
and suspect no-one on this list is.

If someone is determined to compromise the legal integrity of Mesa's
codebase, requiring that they register as Juan Molinos or any other
name which seems like it could be 'legitimate' is not really any
barrier to entry.

Cheers,
Daniel