From: Jeff King Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 17:27:26 GMT Subject: Re: empty ident name trashes commit message Message-ID: <20120723172726.GA2463@sigill.intra.peff.net> In-Reply-To: On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 03:26:26PM +0100, Ramana Kumar wrote: > 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 ) 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