Re: git should not use a default user.email config value

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@grenoble-inp.fr>
Date: Aug 13, 2013, 08:24 UTC
Message-ID: <vpq4nauhubt.fsf@anie.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <20130809194214.GV14690@google.com>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Hi Thorsten,
>
> Thorsten Glaser wrote[1]:
>
>> git config user.email SHOULD NOT default to $(id -un)@$(hostname -f)
>> because just too many cow-orkers seem to be unable to follow basic
>> instructions
>
> Heh.
>
> Can you say a little more about your setup?  In a university
> environment with sysadmin-managed email and /etc/mailname set up
> correctly it is handy that people can start working without doing
> anything special to configure git's "[user] email" setting.

I also work with a university environment. The guessed user.email is almost right (actually, it's not the official email address, but an internal one we ask students not to use). Still, I'd love to see Git error out by default, as most students use Git from several machines. They usually learn and write their first ~/.gitconfig on the school's machines, and then start working from their personal laptops, where the guessed user.email is plain wrong.

We do teach them to set user.email in ~/.gitconfig as a very first step, but many don't (because they don't read the tutorial, or because they do something wrong like putting .gitconfig in the wrong directory). We do tell them to set up ~/.gitconfig on every host they work from, but many don't either. And unfortunately, the warning is not scary enough for some of them :-\ ("Err, did I get a warning? where?").

An opt-in auto-detection would be cool for people who really work in a controlled environment, so that the sysadmin could enable it from /etc/gitconfig.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/