mailmap-generator 0.3.0

A small command line tool to create git .mailmap files from a commit history.

What is this?

This tool, mailmap-generator suggests a Git .mailmap file based on the commit history. It is intended to support you when you have a repository for which you do not have a .mailmap file yet but want to create one.

Installation

pip install mailmap-generator

Requirements

The tool requires that git is installed and accessible on PATH.

How to use it?

You have to either point the tool to a directory containing a Git repository. From the terminal, the tool can be run as in the following:

Usage:
  mailmap <repository>
  mailmap -h | --help
  mailmap --version

Options:
  -h --help             Show this screen.
  --version             Show version.

For example, if you wanted to create a .mailmap file for the psf/requests repository, it could be done as in the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/psf/requests
$ mailmap requests > requests/.mailmap
$ nano requests/.mailmap

The above shows, that the tool just prints a suggested .mailmap file to stdout. Be aware of that the tool only suggests a .mailmap file. It might be wrong. Since the tool maps same author names, you have to inspect and double check if the suggested file is correct.

Calling it from code:

from mailmap_generator.mailmap import create_mailmap

mailmap_str = create_mailmap("<path_to_repo>")

How does the tool create the .mailmap file?

Currently, the tool works in two stages. In the first stage, authors with the same email address are mapped to one author name. Secondly, all authors with the exact same name -- and potentially different email addresses -- are mapped to another. That second step might be wrong in case of authors with same names but different email addresses are actually two different persons.

Alternative tools

Via StackOverflow one finds genmailmap.sh and mailmap_update.py. The latter is removed from the project, i.e., not maintained anymore and inner workings of the former is not entirely clear to me :) Therefore, I created this tool.