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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am missing something, but can’t you simply not show the email address in a git commit? (Sincere question, not saying this is trivial. i am dumb and like to ask dumb questions even if might be embarassing)

If someone wants to message someone, it goes through github notifications or github emails them

Also banning an account doesnt seem like a heavy punishment, given they can simply move to gitlab, bitbucket etc

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Git commits have a email address as a required field[0], although some people put something bogus in there. And then it's in the data provided when you clone the repo onto your machine even if you aren't using the GitHub APIs.

To his point, you can set that to the no-reply email address GitHub gives you if you don't want mail but do want the commit to be linked to your GitHub account.

[0]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit#_commit_information

That would be a fundamental change to how Git works, not just GitHub. Even if the web UI didn't show it, a simple `git log` would reveal it.

You can mask your email address in git commits but a lot of open source projects won't accept that. And some pseudo-open-source ones insist on sending you an email to authenticate before they'll give you access to the GitHub repo (looking at you Unreal Engine!)

So, no, I don't think they could simply "not show the email address".

Makes sens! Appreciate the explanation!

fyi, you can also see the author email by appending ".patch" to the end of a commit URL

Git commits are identified by a hash of their entire contents[1]. The way hashes work, if you change even one bit, the hash becomes completely different. Every commit contains the email address of the committer and the hash of the parent commit. If the email address in even one commit is changed or removed, that changes its hash, which in turn requires you to update its children, changing their hashes etc. So, updating a commit from n years ago requires you to update all commits that have been made since. By default, git will refuse to pull from such an updated repository, as commits are considered immutable once pushed.

[1] In practice, it's a bit more complicated. Merkle trees are involved, so it's hashes of hashes of hashes instead of hashing a multi-gigabyte blob on each commit, but that's a performance optimization that doesn't affect semantics much.

You should be using the email address "username@no.reply.github.com" or similar

There's never been an obligation to use a real email address for git

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