Sometimes, the same person writes documents under different identities. The most common case, perhaps, is your "work identity" and "out-of-work identity": At work, you may add some professional title to your name which you don't use for personal authorship; you may use a different physical and email address etc. Sometimes, the identity change is even in the name itself. For example, a person writing a letter for their spouse or friend, but not logged in to the spouse's account on that computer. Another use case, more relevant in the context of change tracking, is identifying yourself functionally for the purposes of marking changes: Several people are collaborating on a document, say some report, and one of them has an editorial capacity; they may want to mark their tracked changes as editor notes, as opposed to named contributors otherwise (and they themselves might be a contributor, so they would need to separate identities for the same document). While it is possible to just overwrite your single identity in LO, that is not the right way to go; and it certainly does not allow dynamically switching between author identities in the same document. So, I propose support for multiple identities be introduced. I don't suggest that users be exposed to it by default, i.e. it should be something one can access via Tools > Options; and perhaps other bits of default-off UI, like drop-down listbox for one of the toolbars which switches the identity.
Author identity gets recorded into documents and is used for authorship, comments, view port & edit cursor positioning via IsOwnDocument(): meta:initial-creator, meta:creator-initials and multiple dc:creator tags while editing/commenting. If ODF accommodates it, then sure. Provide some ability for a user to have multiple "identities". But should it be each with its own complete LO profile, currated under one os/DE login account? Or a lighter weight ability within current user profile to have more than one dc:creator, meta:creator, meta:creator-initials selectable. Guess it could be either selectable from File -> Properties if per document; or from Tools -> Options -> User Data with the identity lb selectable to fill the first/last/initials fields with choice of identity.
Duplicate of bug 105702 or bug 103212
While normally I'm happy to edit Eyal's BZ musings back to existing issues ;-), but in this case I think this is different from bug 90401, bug 105702, or bug 126360. There the request is to have a single ODF document include meta:initial-creator with multiple authors. And, we can already have multiple dc:creator stanzas from each editor who comments on a document. Currently to be treated as a different user you have to edit Tools -> Options -> User Data to change your ident, OK and restart. But here, I think Eyal was asking for the UI to support a single user's authoring from their choice of pre-established "personas", for example one a Benjamin instance, and one an Eve instance. Any mix of idents meeting user preferences, available from their profile--but unique in the documents being created. So rather than writing out to ODF, this refactoring is what would be needed for UI to be able to support selection of any of several predefined user personas/identities available for use in a current LO session (probably needing a restart).
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #3) Yes, that's exactly it. which is why this request does not depend on any extra ODF support. A 'persona' is good term too, perhaps a better one than identitiy, although that's on the bikeshedding level.