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

[Thomas De Schampheleire]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 4:38 PM, Mads Kiilerich <mads at kiilerich.com> wrote:
> 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.

Currently:
- pull request author: username (full name)
- pull request reviewers: full name
- pull request commit overview: username only
- repo summary/changelog: username if user found, else name from commit header
- changeset detail: username (full name) if user found, else name from
commit header
(I haven't checked all other places yet, like notifications...)

I would go for:
- pull request author: full name (username)
- pull request reviewers: full name (username)
- pull request commit overview: username only

For changeset/changelog displaying, I'm not fully sure: suppose
someone uses the same e-mail to commit under two different display
names, for example 'John Doe' and 'John Doe (scripted)'. In this case,
one would probably expect the name from the commit header to appear in
the changeset/changelog details.
But the correlation to the actual user as known in Kallithea is also
useful, so we should show that too, at least in the changeset details.
In case both the name in the commit header, and the name known to
Kallithea is the same, there would be some duplication if we show
both, though. Maybe we should show both but clearly indicate that one
is coming from the commit header and the other (if available) is the
detail from Kallithea.
So then we'd have:

- repo summary/changelog: name from commit header
- changeset detail: both name from commit header as full name (username).

For other places that I did not identify above, 'full name (username)'
would be preferred, unless if there is limited space in which case
username could be shown alone.

What do you think of that?


>
> 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.

I'm not really opposed to that, but it does mean more typing for the
typical user.

>
> 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.

I was planning to touch upon that subject in my previous reply, but
left it out because I thought it would lead us too far :)

Anyway, I think we should keep external authentication databases into
account: we should be able to map data from such databases into the
scheme we propose. Our LDAP database does have a separate firstname,
lastname, a full name and a common name, so this would be mappable on
your proposal. Note that the 'common name' in our database is not
following the local convention of 'Firstname Lastname' but is
'Lastname Firstname' regardless, and I cannot change it.

Best regards,
Thomas