[Mageia-dev] Contributors using real name/working email? or not? or maybe?

Angelo Naselli anaselli at linux.it
Fri Mar 4 14:37:34 CET 2011


I am in favour, of "should/would".

> The pros (as in "yes one should"):
>  - that is the common way used in MDV and other major distributions
>  - (email or name) it identifies the author of a change to the project/code
>  - (email) it helps identifying & contacting directly someone in the
> project (peer review or any ad hoc matter)
>  - (email & name) it helps building confidence among contributors and
> from the outside
>  - (name) it encourages people to adopt a consistent behaviour
>  - (email & name) it builds one's contributions list for
> future/outside reference
Who wants to contribute, should be easily contacted, either by
mageia community (bugzilla, other develeopers for fixing, suggestions for
his/her packages,....) or by normal users. Last is not always good
because personal mails are not always welcome and the risk some
problems/discussions that remain private goes lost is high.
I always strongly recomend people who contacts me to go on
talking following the right ways (mailing list, bugzilla, etc), because
there I'm not alone (and they as well).
 
Different thing is for occasional contributions, they can decide if they want
to be added or not, since they're not commiting anything, the maintainers
can add or not contributors' information as they want.
> The cons (as in "no, one should be free not to")
>  - public email addresses get spammed
Yes, but a mageia alias, could be a partial solution. If one doesn't 
want to contribute any more, his/her real address is not known.

>  - personal preferences to not reveal one's name
Again are we talking about occasional contribution? if not i can't figure
to go on irc and don't know who contacting for some issues...

>  - there are situations where anonymity is a requirement or "nice to
> have" (from a personal or corporate point of view)
For corporate, an alias could be accepted (if we're talking about a future
mageia corporate) like kde-team or similar. But again for fixed contributions
i can't get it, sorry.

>  - it will encourage people to contact directly contributors instead
> of using other expected channels
As said we're talking about Open source community... Open not closed,
so there's nothing wrong. The hope is there's no crazy criminals that
wants to terminate anyone :)

In my personal experience i've been contacted a lot of time and answered
when i could (my real life does not let me a lot of free time), and
who contacted me has always understood that. Moreover if I could not
have contacted some authors... well that is another story :)
 
Just my 2€ cents,
	Angelo
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