How are Git commit authors mapped to Bitbucket accounts

Question

I'm trying to understand how Bitbucket associates a commit author with a Bitbucket account as we migrate from svn to Git. The commit author is composed of the user's first and last name and email address. E.g.,

Rich Mayfield <rich.mayfield@acme.com>

Here's what I've found:

* If the commit author's name and email address match the first+last name and email address in Bitbucket, match. Good.
* If the commit author's email address does not match an email address of a Bitbucket account, no match. Makes sense.
* If the email address matches but the author's name does not match the first+last name of the Bitbucket account, sometimes Bitbucket matches the commit to an account, sometimes not. The behavior I'm seeing is pretty inconsistent.

How important is it that the Git commit author's name match the first+last name of the Bitbucket account?

Jack-Benny Persson · Answer

Hmm yeah that does seems a bit flakey, I haven't noticed it myself though (haven't tried it either). I found that you can map unknown commit users to your Bitbucket account, instructions can be found here. At that page they also mention that it's the e-mail part that's imporant.

Rich Mayfield · Answer

I was hoping that it was just the email address, however what I'm seeing is that the first and last name also factor into whether or not the commit is correlated to a Bitbucket account.

I have some commits with the correct email address but incorrect first and last name in the commit author information. I'm trying to reverse engineer this... it seems that it could be case insensitive and that a partial match may work (e.g. Will for William as a first name seems to work).

What further frustrates me is that some commits that were not matched earlier today are now correctly correlated to a Bitbucket account. All in all this seems to be amazingly flaky.

Jack-Benny Persson · Answer

As far as I know, it's only the e-mail part that counts. You can also map several e-mail address to a single account. Click your profile picture at the top right cornor then View Profile -> Manage Account -> Email. Here you can add several e-mail address for your account.