[firloop]

> This trick has simplified my project onboarding quite a bit. No more "You forgot to update your Email Address" requests from clients!

Does this happen in practice? Most commits on professional git repos that I work on are of the form <username>@users.noreply.github.com.

[avgcorrection]

I think the noreply email behavior on Github is a bit strange. I commit with my newer email. Then it gets merged to the upstream I was making a pull request in. Then it seems that the committer's (me) email is that noreply email. And then my author email gets rewritten to my old email (the one registered on GitHub first—but both are registered on GitHub). (Why does it much with my emails... I'm just wondering out loud.)

[jomar]

Probably the older email address is still the primary one for the GitHub account.

GitHub took it upon themselves to change email addresses and author names when merging via the UI buttons like "Squash and Merge" in 2018 and then again in 2019. See <https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368> for the tedious details.

Essentially the post-2019 behaviour seems to be that where possible with "Squash and Merge" they will set noreply@github as the committer so that they can sign the merged commit themselves, and set author name & email to what they have recorded for the GH account involved (and the signature is then a record that GH have verified that account's involvement).

Personally I think it is shocking that they ignore the name and email address that the actual author of the commit has selected. This is both a violation of the author's intentions -- for example, you may set work and personal email addresses in different repositories as discussed here, but GitHub will rewrite them all to the same thing when other people press "Squash and Merge" on your pull requests -- and potentially a doxxing security risk.

I have considered re-reporting this to GitHub via the newer community discussions or via support again, but given the extent to which they've ignored all such reports over the last five years it is hard to find the motivation to do so.

[avgcorrection]

Thank you for the explanation and link. I'll have to look into that some more.

It's definitely very dissapointing that GitHub will just change the commit metadata like that. I'm not strongly tied to GitHub right now so I might end up looking somewhere else for similar services.