Re: empty ident name trashes commit message

From: Ramana Kumar <ramana@member.fsf.org>
Date: Jul 23, 2012, 18:05 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMej=25rwCtY6NAJYXNw3jMZSmsZ81Ta1d11kic7CfBkO4zmaw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20120723172726.GA2463@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 03:26:26PM +0100, Ramana Kumar wrote:
>
>> If I forget to set user.email and user.name config options and do a commit
>> (possibly the --amend option also required to make this show up), then git
>> 1.7.11.2 will drops me into an editor for a commit message, then after that
>> complain with the fatal message:
>>
>>    *** Please tell me who you are.
>> [...]
>
> Hmm. I think this is an artifact of running --amend. In the normal case,
> we check the author ident beforehand. But in the --amend case, we take
> the existing author, but then fail trying to generate the committer
> ident. So we could probably do better by checking both explicitly
> beforehand.

Indeed.

Show 11 quoted lines

> Usually we would fall back to your name from /etc/passwd. I guess it is
> blank on your system.
>
>> The commit message I wrote is now lost. [...]
>
> It's not lost. It's in .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG.
>
> We could probably do a better job of informing the user of this when
> commit dies prematurely.
>
> -Peff

I agree, and thank you very much for those two useful pieces of information! (names stored in /etc/passwd and saving of .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG).