GitLab

Summary

List committer email addresses for authenticated users in Cauldron dashboards

Background

The Community tab is especially helpful and one I frequently look at in my Cauldron dashboards. However, one critical piece of information I am looking for is email addresses of committers.

I mostly work with small projects with fewer than 20 committers. Often times, the counted committers are sometimes duplicate users or bot users. I don't want to count those. Seeing the committer email addresses allows me to infer the human-to-bot ratio and see if any users are being counted as different people (i.e. different email addresses). This also gives me some insight to whether external contributors are involved.

From a privacy perspective, the git committer email address data is public data. Anyone can find those emails, count them, and list them, but to do that you need to clone the repo, know your way around git log, and be comfortable with simple scripting. That is a lot of manual work that I think a platform like Cauldron can simplify. However, to avoid spam and abuse, emails could only be shown to authenticated Cauldron users (i.e. not public by default).

Details

Not sure what the best implementation for this might be. I am looking at projects with usually less than 20 committers. I know to some degree, Sorting Hat is likely able to do this work, but I don't know if integrating Sorting Hat with Cauldron is something on the product roadmap.

Outcome

Much faster and easier to figure out who is working on a git repository and to avoid counting bad data for reporting (i.e. duplicates and bots)