Re: git-commit: allow From: line to be entered in commit message

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jan 13, 2006, 21:53 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0601132247530.32562@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <7vy81j6h56.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Hi,

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> sean <seanlkml@sympatico.ca> writes:
> 
> > So do you still agree with that, would you accept a patch?  Or do you have
> > some fundamental reason to think that environment variables are a better
> > way to pass information in this case?
> 
> Fundamental reason of not doing anything is (1) not to make
> unnecessary changes and (1) to avoidi decisions ;-).

You forgot the 3rd (1).

Show 5 quoted lines

> No objections to --from='John Doe <john.doe@example.com>' by
> itself, other than "You could say GIT_AUTHOR_* before the
> command instead of --from after the command; as long as it is
> not done regularly as an interactive command, the difference
> does not matter".

Well, they are not completely idempotent. If you call

	git commit --form='Me <bla@bla.com>'

it will tell you that you misspelt an option. Try that with

	GIT_AUTOR_NAME='Me without H <dumm@my.com>' git commit

>  - Is --from the right word?  Shouldn't it be --author?
>  - Do we want author date?  If not, why not?
>  - What about committer information?  If not, why not?

These are very valid objections, however. As is: why would you want to do that instead of creating an mbox-style file in the first place.

IIRC there was this strange use case which tried to make a clean git tree from several CVS repositories. IMHO it is much easier to cvsimport them, and fix everything from within git, which should be relatively easy with the nice recursive merge.

My 2 cents, Dscho