Re: empty ident name trashes commit message

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 23, 2012, 17:27 UTC
Message-ID: <20120723172726.GA2463@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAMej=270FDFxyVtKTC9v4KUSkSw+TBNOg+LbGfWOgmTe_xKiRQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 03:26:26PM +0100, Ramana Kumar wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> If I forget to set user.email and user.name config options and do a commit
> (possibly the --amend option also required to make this show up), then git
> 1.7.11.2 will drops me into an editor for a commit message, then after that
> complain with the fatal message:
> 
>    *** Please tell me who you are.
> [...]

Hmm. I think this is an artifact of running --amend. In the normal case, we check the author ident beforehand. But in the --amend case, we take the existing author, but then fail trying to generate the committer ident. So we could probably do better by checking both explicitly beforehand.

>    fatal: empty ident name (for <ramana.kumar@gmail.com>) not allowed

Usually we would fall back to your name from /etc/passwd. I guess it is blank on your system.

> The commit message I wrote is now lost. This is bad behaviour - the error
> should happen before one writes the commit message, or the message should be
> saved somewhere.

It's not lost. It's in .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG.

We could probably do a better job of informing the user of this when commit dies prematurely.

-Peff