[PATCH] comments: display username and name instead of only username

[Mads Kiilerich]

On 04/19/2015 05:57 AM, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 12:26 AM, Mads Kiilerich <mads at kiilerich.com> wrote:
>> On 04/18/2015 04:12 PM, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:
>>> # HG changeset patch
>>> # User Thomas De Schampheleire <thomas.de.schampheleire at gmail.com>
>>> # Date 1429285875 -7200
>>> #      Fri Apr 17 17:51:15 2015 +0200
>>> # Node ID a7cc66bf51ec89134cb7b02aca044bb74a56f768
>>> # Parent  e721e300d713a00747e6c519a98b38ef931b0f40
>>> comments: display username and name instead of only username
>>>
>>> The full name is more significant to many people than a username.
>>
>> That is probably very reasonable. I will review in more details later.
>>
>> It would be an even more compelling argument if we could argue that it also
>> is making the UI more consistent. I guess we should have some guidelines
>> and/or macros ...
>>
> Yes, agreed.
>
> My opinion is that a username is typically not relevant to other
> developers, while the full name is. People are not trained to remember
> each other's username.

Well ... that is different between organizations. For us, usernames are 
a convenient way to identify people uniquely - especially when they come 
from other cultures with letters or spelling we are unfamiliar with.

> The username is only needed for @mentions, and
> could be useful when adding reviewers in a pull request.
>
> On the other hand, one could be concerned about two different users
> with the same name, for example Marc Johnson. With this in mind,
> additionally showing the username would differentiate between them.
>
> Originally my preference would have been to only show the full name
> except in some cases, but it may be more consistent (and fix the
> ambiguity for two people with the same name) to always show the name
> as:
>
> Full Name (username)
>
> What do you think?

I guess this is a place where a global configuration could make sense. :-(

It would be nice to show everything everywhere but especially in the 
tables with commits that is not an option.

Somewhat related: the username and email address will often have a 
trivial mapping. I would like to get rid usernames and just use email 
addresses - also for login, perhaps with a config option for a default 
@domainname that always should be stripped.

Another thing is the confusion that comes from having separate first 
name and last name fields. Cultures put given name and family name in 
different order ... and sometimes people compensate for that in 
firstname/lastname, sometimes they don't. I thus prefer to have a "full 
name" field with the preferred spelling of the whole name and something 
like a "nick name" or "common name" with the name the person usually 
goes by. (In addition to that, there might be a "need" for having both 
the "real" name and the name transcribed to a different culture.) This 
ends up as a completely different problem but it might indicate that it 
could be relevant to have some kind of configurable template for naming 
... or a couple of templates for "short" and "long" name.

/Mads