Re: [PATCH v2] Introduce new configuation option to override committer information

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 20, 2011, 19:00 UTC
Message-ID: <7vaaivs8n7.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <201101111542.15185.trast@student.ethz.ch>

Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Well, now that I'm rethinking it, the weird thing is that it does not
> override in the way that the user intuitively might expect.
>
> Assume we also had user.authoremail for completeness, and you do
>
>   git config --global user.authoremail author@example.com
>   git config --global user.committeremail committer@example.com
>   git config user.email user@example.com
>
> Probably the user would expect this to result in a uniform
> user@example.com identity for the current repo, but I don't think we
> can twist it that way with the current config infrastructure.  The
> obvious option of having user.{author,committer}* override the more
> generic user.* would be contrary to that intuition.

The thing is that the "intuition" is not so cut-and-dried. "email" is indeed more generic than "authoremail", so it is intuitive for the latter to override the former. But "$HOME/.gitconfig" is fallback default for the repository specific .git/config so it also is intuitive for anything in the latter to override whatever is in the former. Now you have a conflicting "more specific authoremail in more generic $HOME/.gitconfig vs more generic email in more specific .git/config---which wins?" situation.

Is there a way to document the rule of precedence clearly? For this particular case, recommending against setting author/committer-email in the fallback default $HOME/.gitconfig in the Documentation/config.txt might be sufficient.

But I am still not convinced why two need to be custom-set differently when both need to name _you_. After all, Author and Committer are both identifiers taken from the same namespace to identify real people, so if you want to use one value for the committer to name _you_, I don't see a sane reason why you want a different name to name the same _you_ in the author field.

The specific use case in the thread talks about KDE workflow interpreting the committer identifier in a particular way as a reason for it to be set to a particular value, but does not clarify why the author has to be different from that particular value for the committer.