Re: [PATCH] Add committer and author names to top of COMMIT_EDITMSG.

From: Stephen Sinclair <radarsat1@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 12, 2008, 07:26 UTC
Message-ID: <9b3e2dc20801112326p2b4eaf96tbd036ed746eff4a3@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vve5zy72p.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Show 9 quoted lines

> You omitted the part that matters from the part you quoted
> above, but this discussion was about "showing AUTHOR if it is
> different from me", which was _one of_ the two conditions I
> suggested in my counterproposal, and I was saying that it is
> useless to expect that you would be able to find a
> misconfiguration when AUTHOR is shown for this first reason.
> This part is _not_ about catching your misconfiguration.
>
> The other part is about the misconfiguration catching.

Okay, sorry I guess I was misreading it because that wasn't really my original intention with the patch. However in that context I can see that showing author information when it differs from yourself could definitely be useful.

> Yes, and earlier you said one of the undesirable ones was
> "yourname@foo.local" (and others were "yourname@foo.(none)").
> IOW, "localhost" is one of the things you want to catch as
> unconfigured bogosity that you want to catch, isn't it?

Well, it was only an example to show that it's easily possible (in fact, common) to have hostnames that are not configured as actual email domains. The fact that the hostname contained the word "local" was an indication, but I'm not really sure that filtering for that word in the hostname would be such a good idea. I'm also not sure how many admins will even end up sticking ".local" as their domain, it's probably just a quirk of the administrator for my lab.

I guess "localhost" really clearly is a "bogus" host name, but other than that I can't think of any real rules that would make sense. Rather, IMHO, the error is earlier in the chain: doing anything with the hostname in the first place.

Show 7 quoted lines

> To rephrase, you would show AUTHOR when one of the conditions
> holds true, either:
>
>  (1) "not me" (so that we can remind that other's commit is
>      being amended); _OR_
>
>  (2) "funny me" (so that we can catch misconfiguration.

I definitely agree with (1), though having not really done much amending of other people's commits I can't vouch for it. I think (2) might not be very reliable.

Since submitting the patch, I have added a post-receive hook to my repo which checks all incoming commits and verifies whether any names or email addresses are not in a whitelist. If any are flagged, a warning is displayed. This is actually quite satisfactory for me, since it'll warn me when I accidentally push commits with the wrong name to my private repo, but before I push to public. Let me know if something like this would be useful for the contrib folder..

Steve