Re: Git Rebase blows away GIT_AUTHOR_NAME

From: Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 13, 2011, 18:20 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTik15iV9SOv6rRL5+DQkAZ4JwBGTS+gqS3nXy2hN@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimf2rwKqyWwQbdj7cjS8YcQwCXYGRCvQbZ5HZ19@mail.gmail.com>

In the future please don't top-post, as it makes the discussion harder for other people to follow. I've fixed the quoting for now, though.

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 6:52 PM, JT Olds <jtolds@xnet5.com> wrote:

Show 31 quoted lines

> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 10:47 AM, Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 6:11 PM, JT Olds <jtolds@xnet5.com> wrote:
>>> I got a copy of git-sh-setup. All of my commits (that have either
>>> worked or that I fixed) look like this:
>>>
>>> GIT_AUTHOR_NAME='JT'
>>> GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL='jt@instructure.com'
>>> GIT_AUTHOR_DATE='1294756950 -0700'
>>> Author: jt@instructure.com
>>> Email: jt@instructure.com
>>> Subject: removing nondeterminism from test
>>> Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 07:42:30 -0700
>>>
>>> Should "Author" be my name? Could that be what's going on? I don't
>>> even know where that gets set. The ones that I failed to notice that
>>> they broke before I pushed them look like this:
>>>
>>
>> "git am" (which git rebase builds on) requires the author name to be
>> at least three characters long. This is a problem that has been
>> discussed before, see
>> <AANLkTinqTL7gH4CHEfy8UrhK13xcO_3UzgIyQka00MAh@mail.gmail.com>:
>>
>> http://mid.gmane.org/AANLkTinqTL7gH4CHEfy8UrhK13xcO_3UzgIyQka00MAh@mail.gmail.com
>>
>
> Oh thank you Erik, it's great to just know what the problem is. I've
> been feeling like some voodoo was happening.
>
> What are the chances of decreasing that lower bound of author name size? :)
>

It's a matter of editing the function called "get_sane_name" in builtin/mailinfo.c.

But simply changing the bound doesn't mean you're in the clear. If any other people you work with end up rebasing any patches you've written, the same problem will manifest. There's a lot of people using some really old versions of Git.

And then it's the question of why this is done in the first place. I don't know, but I suspect Linus has his reasons. Besides, a name of two characters aren't really sane. You'd need at least three characters to form a first/last name pair.

I'd recommend that you use a longer name, really.