It appears that the author specifications in some git commits are more free form than name <email>:
- some omit the name and keep the space ( <email>)
- some omit the name and the space (<email>)
- some have trailing spaces (name <email> )
I believe our way out is adding a fullname field to the person table, and making the name and email field "secondary" fields that are filled if we were able to parse the fullname.