You don't exist, Go away! although user.name has been set

Today I was glad. I 've been able to compile git on a maanged server.
git clone did work as well however running
git fetch <remote location> caused the line
      die("You don't exist. Go away!");

to be executed. (the first one)

Before examining that I asked at #git and got the tip to set user.name and user.email which I did. Then I verified that git git var GIT_AUTHOR_IDENT and git var GIT_COMMITTER_IDENT both printed some values.

I still got the failure above. I've fixed it for my case by setting git_default_name and git_default_email just before the check within the ident.c file (line 76)..

However I want to ask wether I've hit a known problem and wether you would appreciate me debggung this issue any further?

Maybe I should add that I've been running that git from the build directory if that matters. The version is 1.6.0 from the official mirror site.

Marc Weber