Hey @LindieK ! I am an Outreachy Applicant and would like to work on this issue.

Hi @somya104 I'm an Outreachy applicant too. I'm currently working on this issue. You can look through the site for possible things that need improvement and create an issue suggesting the improvement. That is if no one else has raised it before.

Okay, thank you so much!

@LindieK there is very little we can actually do about this. The only solution afaict is to revert back to the original command which only displayed authors if there author name was of the form <FIRSTNAME> <LASTNAME>. This has the benefit of removing these duplicates but also the downside of not displaying those who use their username. What do you think?

@patricoferris I see what you mean. I have looked through the commit list and I noted that not only are there people that did not add a Lastname but some use multiple accounts to contribute, some authored changes but did not commit them themselves - in such cases, instead of using the person's first name and last name, it uses their github username.

Would it be possible to use the author's email as a test to see if it refers to the same person? This would reduce the duplicates to those who use multiple accounts to contribute.

@LindieK that sounds like it might work good idea, (I would still only render one of the names used) -- give it a go and see if we cut down on the duplications :))

@patricoferris I tried running git log --format="%aE %aN" | sort | uniq to see how much the duplicates would be cut down. I noticed a few things:

1. Because some commits were made by people other tahn the authors of the changes, the email listed for the author is the auto-generated mail of github.
2. The uniq command runs through the names as well so there are results that bear the same email address but slightly different names (sometimes it's just a letter that causes the difference).

Here is a screenshot of the results:
I circled two different instances of the duplicates.

I only saw meaningful changes when I didn't add the author name to the git log call

@patricoferris I read an article on using a .mailmap file in aliasing authors in Git. Can we do that here?