

How Git shows the patriarchal nature of the software industry - davidbarker
http://blog.megan.geek.nz/how-git-shows-the-patriarchal-nature-of-the-software-industry/

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greenyoda
Making Git user names immutable only seems to show short-sightedness in the
design of Git. Whether this design decision was driven by patriarchal biases
is debatable - it was most likely just a quick and dirty solution in a program
that Torvalds never imagined would become as popular as it has. (With a little
extra work, Git could have mapped internal immutable numerical user IDs to
external names, as in Unix's /etc/passwd file.)

And I don't think you can logically extrapolate from one program designed by
one person to the beliefs of millions of people in the software industry.
There's plenty of software out there (including Linux) that allows people to
change their names easily, all of which was written by the same software
industry.

~~~
HelloNurse
It's not "a little extra work", etc/passwd is far simpler because it isn't
distributed.

How would you propagate user aliases between repositories? Besides, to what
repositories? And how would you make an user authoritative regarding his
alias? Or would you allow every repository to have its own aliases? And...

Easily more complex than the main version control functionality. Sorry, the
only reasonable technical answer to such a feature request for Git is HELL NO.

------
dang
There's a substantive point here, which is that software designs based on
immutable data can conflict with human needs. Sometimes there are legitimate
reasons for wanting to alter records of the past. Append-only logs have the
same problem.

This is interesting because from a technical point of view immutability is
almost always a good property to have, and software designs are increasingly
organized around it.

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HelloNurse
Very sad, considering that reasonable people with less talent for making
themselves unhappy can simply start using another name and email, accept that
their old commits are associated with their old name, and recognize that as
far as DVCS features go integrity trumps flexibility and changing names is
such a bad idea that being reminded of bad times is a necessary sacrifice.

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voidr
If I change my name today, my emails that I sent yesterday won't magically
update for everyone to display my new name.

For some reason my birth certificate and all text ever written with my name
won't automatically update.

Clearly this was a ploy by the evil white mail crowed against the feminists,
LGBT and minorities.

...or the author should get a hobby.

What if I change my name/email address and I do want my old work to stay under
my old identity. I might work for Foo Corporation and then move to Acme Corp.
thereby changing affiliation and email address.

Being able to better manage identities in a git repo would be a great feature,
however in my opinion it's a shameful move to call the git developers
"patriarchal", it is pure slander which I think has no place in a technical
community. The author should either write a patch for git that implements what
she wants, or write a new VCS altogether.

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T2_t2
I don't even know where to start with this.

------
seiji
_If you ever want to change your name on your commits, say you have been
married, divorced or chosen a name more congruent with your gender identity_

What? It's a quirk of git and mercurial that author identities based on
name+email are part of the history itself. There _could_ be a model where
authors have a unique ID maintained independently of the history (every new
name+email pair gets a uuid, you can update what your uuid points to somewhere
else, etc).

Conflating the global "Name <email>" format as a conspiracy against non-white-
males is a bit out there.

 _the majority of people who get a name change are going to be married
/divorced women. It has probably never crossed the minds of the creators of
Git that this could be such a huge problem to a non-cis or non-male person._

What? If you wrote a book before getting married do you go back, collect all
sold copies, and rewrite your name?

 _open themselves up to discrimination if they are forced to reveal their
trans status by disclosing their assigned at birth name._

What? Commit author names and addresses are completely arbitrary, unchecked,
and answer to no authority. Make it up as you go along. There are a lot of
people using GitHub who use fully anonymous names and have no discernible
gender or race. As a wise man once said, "show me the code."

 _Another option is to use a handle /pseudonym. This is also fraught with
problems. ... this can come across as unprofessional to many current and
future employers._

What? Using online nicks isn't unprofessional to people who employ
programmers. It's normal to be a series of random names online. Being fully
anonymous online was actually encouraged before some entitled boarding school
kid decided he wanted to rule the world by invading everybody's privacy.

 _This has personally affected me. Just another example of how a seemingly
small, normative assumption can have profound negative effects on minorities._

Interesting, but this is more against a policy of ever naming anything and
against ever keeping any records for anything ever.

Life sucks, the past sucks, we can't always rewrite our past, but we can
outgrow it and become better and stronger and faster in the future to
suppress, outgrow, and make irrelevant prior pains.

But, as far as Git goes, it does have a way of accumulating same same but
different name/email pairs from the history and treating them as one unified
identity: [http://git-scm.com/docs/git-shortlog#_mapping_authors](http://git-
scm.com/docs/git-shortlog#_mapping_authors) — example:
[https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/.mailmap](https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/.mailmap)

