Re: Two quick proposals on user names and mail aliases

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sat, 2003-11-08 at 21:06, Christian Rose wrote:
> lör 2003-11-08 klockan 21.36 skrev Owen Taylor:
> > Regardless of the particulars of this case (there are a bunch of
> > other James's in GNOME as well), it does bring up some policy issues:
> > 
> >  - How many email aliases can you get?
> >  - When can you get a "common" alias like james gnome org
> > 
> > I'm going to suggest two simple policies:
> > 
> >  - Every foundation member can get a CVS username plus one other alias.
> >    (Or two aliases if they don't have a CVS account.)
> 
> I tend to agree with Matthew here. Letting anyone have an additional
> alias would just further limit the available namespace for anyone else.

After spending some time looking through the 1106 entries in the
CVS repository, I'm more inclined to agree here; we currently already
have some places where we are getting crowed, etc:

 carlos:   Carlos Perelló Marín
 carlosg:  Carlos Garnacho
 carlosgc: Carlos Garcia Campos

> Also, I think it's a further recipe for confusion. Currently people have
> to have the same account names in all places GNOME¹,

This is *largely* true, but not entirely. There are 16 people with
different login names and CVS accounts, plus 7 login accounts that
I don't know who they belong to, that might belong to someone with
a CVS account. (One of the mismatches, is otaylor/owen...) These
mismatches are going to have to be resolved when we switch to ssh
CVS, however.

IRC nicks are, however, much more divergent, though we don't track
them in the user database. And  IRC would be a lot more boring place if
everybody was otaylor, crose, etc...

[...]

> >  - You can only get your first name or last name by itself 
> >    as an email alias if nobody else in the CVS user database and no
> >    other foundation member has that first name (resp. last name.)
> >    Once you get such an alias, you can keep it, however.
> > 
> >    Since there are 1100 entries in the CVS user database, that gives a 
> >    a reasonable definition of "common".
> 
> I'm not confident this will always work out in practice. The GNOME
> community is an active and moving one. Some are only with us for a short
> period of time, while some others are involved with the project for
> many, many years. And in almost all cases there's no way to tell for
> sure when the person joins the project.
> Sometimes people with the same first or last names or initials may
> happen to join the project at roughly the same time, and doing
> judgements on what account names these contributors can use depending on
> their level of commitment and/or whoever happens to be already listed in
> the community with the same first or last name (since the start of the
> project, or even since only a few weeks ago), is probably not more fair
> or accurate in general than the simple and common "first come, first
> serve" policy that has been used until now.

Well, if you think that checking what first names, last names are
already assigned is too much judgment, I'd believe that we should 
simply reject request for first-name-only or last-name-only aliases. I
don't want someone getting, say, anders gnome org 

> I believe things can turn out to be unfortunate in some cases with both
> policies; just that the suggested one is more complex.
> 
> 
> >    We might want to consider expiration times for this rule - 
> >    e.g., we might allow Marc Mulcahy to get marc gnome org as
> >    an email alias since Marc Ewing hasn't touched GNOME CVS since 
> >    1998 or so.
> 
> These cases should probably be handled by just deleting such old
> accounts that haven't been used for years.

Reusing CVS ID's isn't possible - you completely screw up the history -
suddenly some new contributor was hacking on grpm in 1998. (And knowing
who committed what in CVS is important.)

Plus, probably reusing mail account names is a bad idea; especially
if we, say, start using GPG keys - if we've signed someone's key
as marc gnome org, then we can't assign that to someone else.

(My suggestion is that if people leave GNOME foundation, or whatever
the the right thing to do is to bounce mails to their alias with a:

==
 Blah is no longer a GNOME foundation member.

 The most recent email address we have for Blah is blah blah net
==

response.)

If GNOME sticks around for 20 or 30 years, we'll probably end up
with things like owtaylor28, but but, well, we can deal with that
problem when we come to it.

So, we should never be deleting entries out of the CVS user database,
just disabling them. (We could theoretically edit the CVS history
to s/marc/Marc_Ewing_001/ or something when we delete an account,
but that sounds more complex than it is worth.)

> We should perhaps more stress that people are careful when choosing
> their account name though --
> http://developer.gnome.org/doc/policies/accounts/requesting.html
> currently mentions nothing about the rules for the account names. Some
> suggestions for account name rules:
> 
> * Use 8 characters at max.
> 
> * Use only lowercase ASCII characters 'a' to 'z'.
> 
> * Use an account name that you want to get known by in the GNOME
> community for a very long period of time, even though you may not expect
> so at this point. Don't just out of habit use an account name that you
> use elsewhere without thinking it through -- make sure you will be
> actually satisfied with the account name for a long period of time.
> 
> * Use an account name that is in some way related to your full name, so
> that other contributors will easily know that it is you. This can be any
> combination of your first and last name, initials, or a nickname related
> to your full name.
> Good examples (if your full name is John B. Doe):
> 	johndoe
> 	johnbdoe
> 	johnd
> 	johnbd
> 	jdoe
> 	jbdoe
> 	john      (*)
> 	doe       (*)
> 	jbd
> 	johnnie
> 	johnnied
> Bad account name examples³:
> 	john42
> 	john_d
> 	JohnDoe
> 	pantsman
> 	l33tguy
> 	gnuchick
> (*) Be careful with using your only your first or last name if you
> believe it could be a common name.

This is reasonable; I usually encourage people to follow rules similar
to this. (johnnie should also get the (*).) 

Regards,
						Owen