Re: "commit --author=..." does not work if global email and name is not set

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 5, 2019, 08:11 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPc5daVQTouBVqJPccQNdzFP6XYEL7G2UUH-HC4QgYdRWt__Kw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAA01Csp7y9=2n9=TNYMMw9LUO_cENz7FBeZjFrUd2FvHFT9NCQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Apr 5, 2019 at 4:35 PM Piotr Krukowiecki <piotr.krukowiecki@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> Hi,
>
> I have a repo downloaded on machines which do automatic tests.
> Sometimes I want to make a quick fix there and push back to origin.
> Reading git-commit docs I had impression that I can use "--author=me"
> and it will work. But it requires setting global user name and email:

You can still do

 git -c user.name=me -c user.email=me@my.addre.ss commit ...

if you do not want to follow the advice message to store the ident permanently.

>   git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
>   git config --global user.name "Your Name"

Technically, what you are missing when you give --author is only the committer ident, so you can probably use

  GIT_COMMITTER_NAME=me GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL=me@my.addre.ss \
  git commit --author=me ...

even though it is not any shorter ;-).

I think all of the above is quite expected. The fact that --author is used to specify the ident of the author is a good sign that it is different from the committer ident (otherwise the user would be using a configured default ident that is always used as the committer ident, without overriding it with the --author) option.