Changing Name Associated With Past Commits In Mercurial

Question

A friend recently had the occasion for a legal name change, which made me wonder about how to cope with that in a development environment, especially in regards to source control.

Their legal name changed, so naturally their login name and associated identity stuff changed. If they were a team member of mine, I'd like to change the record of their past commits to the project to be consistent with their new name. Is that possible in Mercurial? In other version control systems?

Answer 1

See the ConvertExtension. It can be used to do a Mercurial-to-Mercurial database conversion. Specifically, see the --authors switch to remap author names.