[postgis-devel] "SVN on behalf of" considered harmful

[Greg Troxel]

The From: field of SVN commits has extra text instead of the committer's
name.  So, it not only doesn't match the normal way that person sends
mail, but it is not a reasonable form to use in composing mail.  All
sorts of mail systems, most importantly emacs/bbdb :-), observe names
with email addresses and remember them to offer as completion choices.

So I think this:

  From: SVN on behalf of Sandro Santilli <strk at keybit.net>

should be

  From: Sandro Santilli <strk at keybit.net>

which is how regular mail from strk@ looks.

This is not abuse of From:, because the message really is being
generated on behalf of the committing user, and contains comments whose
semantics are determined by the commit and commit message.  It would be
appropriate to set a Sender: field to indicate this, although the
message goes to a mailinglist that will replace the sender field anyway.

I've been running systems for years with From: as I suggest and there
have basically been no issues.

An alternative is to make the From: be a role account with no mention of
a person, and put that in the body.  But having the From: simple seems
best.

And thanks for setting this up; I think it's 97% good and am only
talking about the 3%....


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From: SVN on behalf of Sandro Santilli <strk at keybit.net>
Subject: [postgis-tickets] r14290 - Draft a CONTRIBUTING file as suggested	by Jody Garnett
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2015 03:52:10 -0700
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