I am fairly new to git (only used it for the last 2 months in my contributions to KiCad). When I first set up my Gitlab account and my local .gitconfig, I just followed the advice I read on the internet and decided to use my username (Qbort) as the Author name and the “private email” that Gitlab auto-generates (e.g. something like 124567-Qbort@users.noreply.gitlab.com) as the author email.
However, I recently started browsing the KiCad commit history and noticed most developers use their real names and email addresses. After seeing this, I’ve changed my settings so that when I make a commit it uses my real name as the author of the commit (I do like the idea of being credited for a contribution).
However, I’m still unsure about using my real email address. I’ve been reading about this and the conclusion I have reached is that putting a real email address as the commit email might not be a good idea. Spam bots can get hold of your email address by just parsing Gitlab website (see https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/graphs/master ), since Gitlab doesn’t make any attempt to obfuscate the commit email - it just shows it plain text.
In contrary, the developer mailing list (https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/) does a really good job of hiding the email addresses of individuals by replacing most of the address with “xxxxxxxx”.
So my question is: what are the reasons someone might decide to use their real email address as the commit/author email in git? Are there any benefits to doing so?
Thanks.