Subject: bug#19503: most translations of proper names aren't being used

From: Jim Meyering <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2015 13:18:11 -0800

On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 9:43 AM, Pádraig Brady <[email-masked]> wrote:
...
> BTW, it might have been nice to have the initial git commits
> for these tools attributed to the original author. Hindsight and all that :)

It would have been nice, indeed.

When I agreed to do the job of maintaining the fileutils, textutils and
shellutils packages, I tried hard to find a CVS repository (no
dVCS existed back then), but as far as I could tell, if there had been
one, it was gone. It was only reluctantly that I resorted to putting
old tarballs on versioned release branches.  While djm was the primary
author for many tools, there were invariably commits by others, too, as
seen in old/*/ChangeLog*.  However, without some VCS files, it was not
feasible to attribute.  Even with ChangeLog+CVS, automated attribution
as I did for the glibc cvs-to-git conversion was nontrivial: most commits
were done by Ulrich, but ChangeLog usually gave the name of the "Author",
and reliably mapping the cvs user-name or ChangeLog-attributed name to
a git Real Name/email pair took some work.