Re: [PATCH 4/6] var: provide explicit/implicit ident information

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 14, 2012, 17:06 UTC
Message-ID: <20121114170657.GC6858@elie.Belkin>
In-Reply-To: <20121113165308.GD12626@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Internally, we keep track of whether the author or committer
> ident information was provided by the user, or whether it
> was implicitly determined by the system. However, there is
> currently no way for external programs or scripts to get
> this information

What are the intended semantics? If my machine has /etc/mailname filled out, is that an implicit identity? How about if I set the EMAIL envvar but not GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL?

If external scripts are going to start using this mechanism, they will need answers to these questions to support users that run into configuration problems. A few words on this in the documentation could probably help.

On most machines I have the EMAIL envvar set explicitly, but in the recent past I relied on /etc/mailname on some others, so I'm also genuinely curious about the use case here (and too lazy to dig it up).

Thanks, Jonathan