Re: [PATCH] tagger id

From: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Date: Jul 12, 2005, 15:04 UTC
Message-ID: <m14qb012x4.fsf@ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com>
In-Reply-To: <7veka48lcw.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> writes:

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> ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) writes:
>
>> Should this default to git_author_ident or git_committer_ident?
>> I'm not really certain how we expect to use the different flavors.
>
> 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.

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> Having said that, for something like this that would not be used
> constantly and interatively by the users, my preference is not
> to have any default at all, and always require --author or
> --committer.  You have to type a bit more when doing the script,
> but that needs to be done only once.  You will be sure which one
> you are asking from the command two weeks after you wrote the
> script so it is not a big loss.

Make sense. Although I'm not quite certain we actually need the information twice. Possibly we just have GIT_AUTHOR_NAME and GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL, and then have commit-write take a flag to override the author bit. That would certainly make it less confusing when setting up environmental variables for git. And that would also give us a better name.

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> I am not seriously suggesting the below as an alternative, but
> have you thought about doing an inverse function of your
> computation for the case when the user has all the environment
> variables, and have script eval its output, like this [*1*]:
>
>     $ git-id
>     GIT_AUTHOR_NAME='Junio C Hamano'
>     GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL='junkio@cox.net'
>     GIT_COMMITTER_NAME='Junio C Hamano'
>     GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL='junkio@cox.net'
>     $ eval "`git-id`"
>     $ tagger="$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME <$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL>"
>
> Having names and emails available separately may turn out to be
> easier to use in other situation.  Just a thought.

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).

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> By the way, I do not particularly like the name "git-id".  There
> could be IDs for different kinds (not just people) we would want
> later (file IDs, for example).  Naming what you are computing
> _the_ "id" feels a bit too generic.  I do not have a better
> alternative to suggest, though.

Agreed. Something like git-author or git-author-stamp is probably better.

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> *1* This makes its output syntax a bit too specific to the shell
> and unfriendly to Porcelain written in other languages.  The
> only non-shell Porcelains I am aware of are done in Perl (I do
> not remember hearing its name) and Python (StGIT), both of which
> have reasonable regexp support to grok something like this, so
> it would not be a big issue.

And in git-commit-script this is actually parsed by sed which makes it so the shell can parse the information as well so I think we are fine in that sense.

Eric