Forums : Technical Issue Help

Dear ohloh support team,

Please update my project, FEST, at your earliest convenience. The major issue is aliases. There are two Alex Ruiz (one assigned as myself, and the other one, alexruiz, who has all the commit history.) I did set up aliases many months ago, but I don't see the changes.

Many thanks in advance,
-Alex

Alex Ruiz over 16 years ago

Hi Alex,

I admit that we are about a week behind on project updates. I will schedule FEST for an expedited update.

However, the issue with aliases and contributor names was simply caused by the aliases being set up incorrectly. This is a confusing part of our UI that takes a long time to explain -- let me know if you are interested. Meanwhile, I've set up your account to properly point at the source control, so everything should be working now.

Thanks,
Robin

Robin Luckey over 16 years ago

Hi Robin,

Thanks for your reply! I'm interested in known more about aliases, so next time I'll do things correctly :D

Cheers,
-Alex

Alex Ruiz over 16 years ago

Hi Alex,

Sorry, I should have taken the time to explain before. Sometimes there are just too many things to do at once :-).

I suppose by now Ohloh should have some instructions or a FAQ around this topic. It's a very confusing part of our UI that isn't well explained. I keep hoping we'll find time to simply fix the problems so that we won't need a FAQ. Here comes an entirely-too-long, entirely overdue explanation of aliases, for posterity and future reference.

The alias feature on Ohloh has a very limited, specific purpose: you use this feature to replace one committer name with another name from the same repository. It does not affect Ohloh accounts, and it does not work across repositories. You cannot create aliases to and from arbitrary names; both the before and after names must already exist in the source control system.

An alias is equivalent to a text search and replace operation on the names in the source control log. Importantly, once the search and replace occurs, the original name is gone, and only the replacement name remains. The original name does not appear in Ohloh's statistics database.

If you want to link your Ohloh account to a source control committer name (and we allow you to link to just one name per project), you must link your account with the final replacement name. If you try to link to the original name, you'll come up empty.

I think there is a common misperception that defining an alias makes both of the names equivalent: that you can then specify either of the names, and they will all lead to the same data. That is not true: only the replacement name has data; the original name no longer yields any data at all.

Linking your account to a name which has been removed with an alias is a very common problem. For a casual Ohloh user, it's very hard to diagnose what is wrong. To fix this, you don't create another alias -- you have to change your account to use the correct, post-alias replacement name.

Another common problem is that people successfully associate their Ohloh account with a committer name, but then they replace the repository! For instance, it is common for projects to use Subversion (usually with nicknames like robin), but then to switch their project over to Git, where they have a new name (usually with full names like Robin Luckey). The problem here is the Ohloh account is still linked to the old Subversion name, but the Subversion data has been completely removed from Ohloh. Again, the problem is not in the aliases; it is in the account.

The final mistake people commonly make is trying to use an alias to convert from one name in one repository to another name in another repository. An alias only works within a single repository. Very commonly, after switching from Subversion to Git, people try to use an alias to map the new Git names back to the old Subversion names (or vice versa), and find that this doesn't work.

Almost universally, problems that people think are alias problems are actually problems where the account is linked to an old name. Strictly speaking, people seem to have no trouble with aliases, but have numerous problems associating their accounts with the correct post-alias name. And that's our fault, for making such a complicated, no-instructions-included web UI.

For the record, on your account home page, every project position has a small EDIT link next to it. That link takes you to a form where you can change your committer name. The form has an autocompleter to help you pick a correct, current name.

I hope this long ramble gives some idea of how aliases work, and how they often don't help. There are many things we can do in the UI to (completely?) hide this complexity from the user, but there's so much to do, so little time....

I just may have the seeds of a FAQ in here.

Thanks for using Ohloh. Let me know if you have more questions,

Robin

Robin Luckey over 16 years ago