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Comment by simoncion

10 hours ago

> - mailing lists are even worse usability-wise because these by design leak your email address...

So does git and GitHub. Last I checked, authoring a git commit with an email address associated with your GitHub account is what makes GitHub attribute that commit to your account. I assume Gitlab works in a very similar way.

"But 'git clone' is soooo much harder than reading through mailing list archives!" Nah.

If you don't want to expose your email address but you still want commits to be associated to your account, Github lets you use a noreply email address [1].

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/reference/ema...

  • I actually was looking into this recently (exploring how much of a PITA changing my github email would be) and found it interesting that, while in principle your GH email is public to anyone interfacing with your commits via `git`, they have gone to some length to avoid displaying it anywhere in the web interface. The docs actually mention it being shown on your 'profile' page but I don't see it anywhere there.

  • > Github lets you use a noreply email address

    Oh, I was unaware of that. I've not seen anyone use it, [0] but I've only paid any attention to the Big Corporate and Traditional Hacker populations.

    Thanks much for the information.

    [0] I'm certain that folks do use it, so folks shouldn't bother pointing out people that do.

    • It's the default on new accounts for stuff when people do things through the GitHub interface.

      If you set user.email using git-config on your machine to a real email address and decide to author and publish commits with it, then GitHub will, of course, not be able to stop you (aside from maybe rejecting the commits when you tried to push them). It can't just arbitrarily rewrite the email address in the commit. That would break Git's data model.