GitHub username change (with noreply as email for commits)

Question

I saw that GitHub had a name change feature, and the loss seemed not very problematic for me. However, I realized after the fact that I had been using my old name's @users.noreply.github.com to commit and everything. So, that old email had all my previous commits linked together. Is there any way to fix this issue?

I have been thinking maybe I could create an account with my previous name and just have people who are interested go through that link? Rebasing the repo or anything like that is not quite applicable in this case as I have contributed code to other repositories so my old commits would still be outstanding over there without a name or email to link the account with.

The other way I have been thinking is to just change my name back, but I suppose this is the last resort. It kind of is unfortunate, but I guess due to the way Git works it just has to be like so. (I have now switched to my gmail email to avoid this in the future in case)

Answer 1

How to fix it depends upon your philosophy. That is, the answer is opinionated, so I will offer my opinion: rewriting history is lying:

The primary output of development work should be source code. Is a well-maintained history really such an important by-product? Most of the arguments for rebase, in particular, rely on aesthetic judgments about “messy merges” in the history, or “unreadable logs”. So rebase encourages you to lie in order to provide other developers with a “clean”, “uncluttered” history.

(Source, emphasis mine.)

All of those old commits were made under your original brand. For whatever reason, you've decided to re-brand yourself. Perhaps trivially, or perhaps for some fundamental reason. Regardless, from the perspective of the Internet, you're different. Don't go rewriting history to track your old self through to your new self. Let those commits lie as they are.

Instead, consider adding another email or posting notice on your projects' README.