Using Environment variable GIT_CONFIG does not work as expected

Hi,

I have a shared linux account which is used by multiple developers. But I would like to have git commit history configured so that I can see who made a change to common repository (so that author of the commit would be correct person, not shared user). There are reasons why developers cannot clone this environment to their own accounts.

So I don't have ~/.gitconfig in place for the shared user, and when developer log in I enforce them to configure git for them first. They must "export GIT_CONFIG=my_specific_gitconfig". When this is done, "git config -l" will show correctly the user.name, user.email and other parameters which are set in "my_specific_gitconfig".

However, if user tries now to create a commit the git blames: *** Please tell me who you are. and so on...

But running "git config -l" shows that 'user.name' and 'user.email' are properly configured. Do I need to configure something more in order to get this GIT_CONFIG environment variable working. I'm working in Debian Linux environment.

I have tested this with git versions: 2.1.4, 2.11.0 and 2.18.0.321.gffc6fa0

Thanks, Mika