allow multiple users with the same email

when creating a new user, one has to pass a unique username (makes sense, as this identifies a persona) and a unique email address (wtf?).

also, when adding a new email-address to my existing account, i can only add addresses that nobody else claimed.

i think not allowing email-addresses to be shared is slightly problematic, as it prevents users from creating multiple personas if they only have a single email address (or don't want to use e.g. their work email address for private repos or vice-versa).

the restriction probably makes for a provider like GitHub, where the (iirc) terms-of-use state that a single person may only create a single account. But for my own gitlab instance i would like to be able to make up my own terms-of-use.

in practice, sometimes people do share email-addresses (esp. generic addresses): however, this means that the first user can claim the address, blocking other users to show that they are affiliated with that email address.

This is also related to #1376 (closed), where the official workaround for write-access deploy keys is to create a dummy user: if my dummy users must not share their email-addresses, i need to create a dummy email address for each repository that needs a write-acess deploy key.

btw, i think that the administrator of an instance should decide whether they allow multiple users with the same address. (e.g. there are certainly sites that do not want that feature enabled; there might be other sites that only want to allow email sharing in specific cases and not as a general feature for everybody).

the only technical reason for the limit i can think of (and i haven't read the gitlab code) is probably selecting the proper avatar.

but selecting the wrong avatar for shared email addresses is probably ignorable.

We use email address to match commit author and GitLab user. If there are multiple users with the same address we wouldn't be able to match in this way. It's the only reliable way to do this. I don't think there's much chance we will be able to change this in the near future.

in any sufficiently popular repository you will find authors that do not have direct access to the repository (e.g. they are not gitlab users, but have got their commit into the repository); and i many authors use different email-addresses when committing (often made-up addresses, like nobody@localhost.localdomain, esp. when developping things in parallel on multiple machines)

so you have to deal with email addresses matching 0 or 1 known commit authors (users) on a regular basis anyhow. I fail to see what could possibly go wrong if it matches multiple known users.

On re-reading i think i understand better what you mean (and that i partly missed the point in my previous reply). anyhow:

Commit emails can very easily be spoofed:

git commit --author "Drew Blessing <drew@gitlab.com>" -m "that wasn't me"

This is well documented, and should not be used for mission critical identification of users.

In any case: if the reason why you only allow a email-address to belong to a single user is that you want to have a clickable icon besides the committer, taking you to the user profile, then i would say:

if there are multiple accounts associated with an email-addresses, just handle it as if there were no accounts associated with it (make it a mailto link rather than taking it to the user-profile page)

Added feature proposal label

+1 This should not be an enforced standard, admins need to be able to control this.

+1 I'd like to add that the admins ability to control this would be a great help in our case. We currently have a few non-human accounts which we use for various automation tasks surrounding git. I would prefer not to have to setup an email for each of them.

Like @aboccia already mentioned. In my setup there are some non-human or service users for different purposes. I don't like the idea of creating a new email account for each of them, nor I want to have accounts with not existing email addresses (thats the case today) in my system.

As a workaround, I have created a catchall blackhole on our mailserver to which I can point alias addresses at to assign to our non-human users. This works since we don't care about receiving emails for them. Tossing this info out there for anyone else who may be in the same predicatment.

Thanks for your input everyone. At this time, it's important that an email address be associated with a single user only. Duplicate emails would cause many problems due to the way Git works. For now we will continue to enforce unique email addresses.

closed

Create a local user on your git server, even without a password and register that email: user@gitserver.example.com

The e-mails will be sent locally.