Allow personal email addresses to be ommitted in commits

[pappasadrian]

Is your feature request related to a problem? If so, please describe.

Email addresses used by translators are included in the commit files, with no option to opt out/turn off. This leads to leaks of personal information publically, by including addresses in public code. This is not respectful towards translators who contribute, and potentially illegal in some jurisdictions (Especially considering that there's no specific consent given. Everyone is opted-in by default, with no option to opt out).

Describe the solution you'd like

Add an option allowing translators's email to not be included in commits.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Using a fake email is not an option, as a valid email is required for other features of weblate.
Using an throwaway/single use email is also not very viable, as it is very cumbersome for users, and not a clear option for people who don't want their personal information leaked.

Screenshots

Additional context

Relevant issue: #4988

[github-actions]

This issue has been added to the backlog. It is not scheduled on the Weblate roadmap, but it eventually might be implemented.

In case you need this feature soon, please consider helping or push it by funding the development.

[bjorn3]

Github gives everyone a email address like bjorn3@users.noreply.github.com to be used as commit author. Alternatively giving the option to use one of the secondary email addresses associated with a github account rather than the primary one would be nice. For example zulip asks you which of the email addresses associated with your github account to use. Personally I have my private email address set as primary email on my github account, but a public email address as secondary email.

[nijel]

The final solution should look like:

• Prefer public address from GitHub, done in 90e1011
• Fetch all verified addresses from GitHub and store them as VerifiedEmail, done in b0cbaa3
• Add separate selection for email address to use in Git commits

[phw]

@nijel Thanks for getting into this discussion. Could this also be done independent of a users GitHub profile? Not every users has one. I imagine something similar to how Github does it:

• First have a separate "Commiter e-mail" field the user can set, so the e-mail being used for commits is separate from the main communication e-mail. The user can fill in any value they want to have a different e-mail for committing. If they omit this the primary e-mail address will be used.
• Have an option "Keep my e-mail address private". Activating this will automatically use some e-mail address in the form of "username@weblate_host", let's say for example "phw@hosted.weblate.org"

This is how it looks like in Github:

I even think this option should be active by default. It's better users have to activate their real e-mail than to have them discover later that they published their private e-mail address. E.g. Transifex also has an option to keep e-mail private, but it is disabled by default We had some discussion about this on the MusicBrainz forums, where users where badly surprised that Transifex put their e-mail addresses into public translation files.

[nijel]

There are many questions related to this:

• Should Weblate allow entering any address as committer e-mail without any verification?
• Keeping the address private on Weblate side will avoid associating commits on GitHub, that will be surprising for many users if that would be a default. On the other side, I understand that privacy wise, there might be good reasons for that.
• Keeping the address private requires some setup to avoid problems with the e-mail addresses (make sure these do not end up in some mailbox) - something we can easily do on Hosted Weblate, but on the other side, something we cannot realistically expect from thousands of other Weblate installations. So, this would have to be an opt-in feature enabled in the configuration, which is used only on few installations.

[bjorn3]

Should Weblate allow entering any address as committer e-mail without any verification?

Probably not.

Keeping the address private on Weblate side will avoid associating commits on GitHub, that will be surprising for many users if that would be a default. On the other side, I understand that privacy wise, there might be good reasons for that.

An option would be to use the github user specific noreply email as author for the commit and an email address forwarding to the author in the commit message (if you want to introduce any forwarding in the first place).

For me specifically allowing me to pick any of the already email addresses verified by github would be fine.

[phw]

@nijel Those are good points. So give the user the ability to specify a separate commit e-mail from their verified e-mail addresses + importing the verified e-mails from github as verified is probably a good first start.

Having the ability to configure a weblate instance to provide custom e-mails (maybe on a specified subdomain) would be a great addition I think, but it really complicates things. E.g. ideally the user would still be able to add this fake e-mail to their github account.

Maybe an easier approach would be to allow anonymous commits, where the commits then get associated with a default user + e-mail provided by the weblate instance (e.g. most setups could use the Github account they use for pushing).

This should be clearly an opt-in from the user, with the note that commits will then not be associated with their own Github user account. Also this option should only be available to users if the instance is configured accordingly. Would this work?

UPDATE: On Gitlab the user also has the option to separately specify the commit e-mail and the e-mail used for communication, but both need to be from the list of verified e-mails.

[ann0see]

On hosted Weblate probably 90e1011 is already included, I assume. Even if the relevant checkboxes are set on GitHub, it doesn't change anything on Weblate, the E-Mail is still exposed.

I assume it's not possible to get these values from GitHub?

[nijel]

That commit just makes Weblate prefer the public e-mail address if you have it configured on GitHub.

[bjorn3]

How do you set an e-mail address as public? I can't find any ui for it. The only option I see it to keep everything private or everything public.

[nijel]

When editing profile: