Hi Stephane!

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?st=E9phane_ducasse?= <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
> Are you joking? in 2005 playing with 2 characters instead of 15 does  
> not make sense.

Stephane, please don't be sarcastic with me. No, I am not joking.

> Why people should get a account on Squeakmap to use MC? or Squeak?
> I think that this does not make sense.

It does make sense and on the Swiki we have had a pointer to SM ever
since SM2 came about so that people register there instead of typing in
their initials in a Swiki page.

Now, the user name on SM doubles as developer initials. If you register
there then you are sure that those initials are *yours* to use, because
they need to be unique.

The whole point with the developer initials is that we can absolutely
for sure know who wrote what. So it is vitally important that the
developer initials field can be used to identify the person
unambiguously.

> >>> Yes. I totally agree with you.
> >>> The community is enough big that we easily find other developers  
> >>> with
> >>> the same initials.

Yes, but then people will just have to find a variation on the initials
that is unique. The whole grand point with having a central place where
we register the initials and make sure they are unique *and* map them to
a name and an email is precisely the fact that we then can use those
initials as a key.

> >> I *don't* agree - just use SM instead! The initials are ensured to be
> >> unique on SM and looking up a name is trivial - just add some code to
> >> the tools that do this:
> 
> I'm not hacking the tools. I'm reviewing code that should be  
> published or
> not and I'm reading initials and I do not know what are these persons.
> So may be I should stop harvesting after all.

Hehe, no - you should not stop harvesting, but I would be grateful if we
stick to the idea of using SM as the map of Squeak as it is intended.

If we don't make sure people register we:

1. Risk duplicates of dev initials. Yes, there might very well be more
than one David Smith, especially if that person just types in "David S"
etc. And from image to image David might even type in slightly
differently causing even more confusion.

2. Do not know who has which initials.

Now, if you want MC to have a free form field with a name just like
ChangeSets typically have - fine with me. But let us please use dev
initials as the unique key it is.

regards, Göran

PS. Soon it is time to clean up SM, lots of bogus looking accounts there
now.