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

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 14, 2012, 19:53 UTC
Message-ID: <20121114195357.GD3860@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20121114170657.GC6858@elie.Belkin>

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 09:06:57AM -0800, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> Jeff King wrote:
> 
> > 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.

The intent is to make git's internal rules (whatever they may be) available to calling scripts. But I agree those rules should be spelled out now that they are becoming a more visible interface. I'll update the documentation.

> 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).

Right now EMAIL is explicit, but `id`@`cat /etc/mailname` is not. I think changing that would be a separate issue, though (and I'm not sure whether it is a good idea; my /etc/mailname is not an email address I would want to use).

-Peff