From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@twinsun.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 21:16:52 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] tagger id
Message-ID: <loom.20050712T230013-978@post.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <m14qb012x4.fsf@ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com>

Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm <at> xmission.com> writes:

> 
> Junio C Hamano <junkio <at> cox.net> writes:
>
> > The only in-tree user after your patch is applied is the tagger
> > stuff, so in that sense committer_ident may make more sense.
> 
> There is also the commit path, and that comes from C.  I'm not
> quite certain how we should be using the environmental variables.

But there you would not have "default" issue, would you?

> Part of the request was to put all of this information together
> in a common place.  And note that it is actually:
> tagger="$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME <$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL> $GIT_COMMITTER_DATE"
> Where the date is a human unreadable string of the number of seconds
> since the epoch (aka 1 Jan 1970 UTC).

This may sound whacy, but how about having git-env command that

 (1) parrots GIT_* environment variables if the user has one; or
 (2) shows the values of environment variables the user _could_ have had
     to cause the program to behave the same way, when it the user does
     not have them?

Synopsis.

  $ git-env [--values-only] [<variable name>...]

Examples.

 $ git-env GIT_COMMITER_DATE GIT_AUTHOR_NAME
 GIT_COMMITTER_DATE='1121202267 -0700'
 GIT_AUTHOR_NAME='Junio C Hamano'
 $ unset GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY
 $ GIT_DIR=foo git-env --values-only GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY
 foo/objects
 $ git-env
 GIT_DIR=.git
 GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY=.git/objects
 ...
 $ eval "`git-env GIT_COMMITTER_DATE GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL GIT_COMMITTER_DATE`"
 $ tagger="$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME <$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL> $GIT_COMMITTER_DATE"

We could add a couple of "variable name"s that we do _not_ use
from the environment as a shorthand as well while we are at it,
so that you can say:

 $ git-env GIT_COMMITTER_ID
 GIT_COMMITTER_ID='Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> 1121202267 -0700'

Once we go this route, it may even make sense to have that GIT_COMMITTER_ID
environment variable as well.  I don't know..