Re: [PATCH v2] send-email: explicitly disable authentication

From: Joshua Watt <jpewhacker@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 23, 2018, 02:40 UTC
Message-ID: <CAJdd5GaQtHVX_wCF8D3y4qJ-a6RdMHpv=BGQVM=xfBEe8xEyOw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqd0s1tsdd.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 7:32 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

>
> Joshua Watt <jpewhacker@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > It can be necessary to disable SMTP authentication by a mechanism other
> > than sendemail.smtpuser being undefined. For example, if the user has
> > sendemail.smtpuser set globally but wants to disable authentication
> > locally in one repository.
>
> I wonder if it would be more productive to introduce a mechanism
> that can be used to address that use case more directly.  For
> example, would it help to teach "git send-email" that
> sendemail.smtpuser set to a particular value (say '!', or empty
> string if you prefer) is equivalent to the variable unset at all?
>

I'm a little worried that is more likely to break someone's workflow (although, I'm not sure why someone would have such simple username). Using sendemail.smtpauth = "none" is pretty much guaranteed to not break an existing setup because git send-email would previously reject any value that wasn't upper case. I suppose the one disadvantage is that it isn't backward compatible, since setting sendemail.smtpauth to "none" wouldn't work with older versions of git (due to it not being upper case), but I'm not sure how much of a concern that is.

IMHO, setting "" or "!" for sendemail.smtpuser probably isn't any more clear or direct for the end user than my solution.