Re: empty ident name trashes commit message

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 01:27:26PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 03:26:26PM +0100, Ramana Kumar wrote:
> 
> > If I forget to set user.email and user.name config options and do a commit
> > (possibly the --amend option also required to make this show up), then git
> > 1.7.11.2 will drops me into an editor for a commit message, then after that
> > complain with the fatal message:
> > 
> >    *** Please tell me who you are.
> > [...]
> 
> Hmm. I think this is an artifact of running --amend. In the normal case,
> we check the author ident beforehand. But in the --amend case, we take
> the existing author, but then fail trying to generate the committer
> ident. So we could probably do better by checking both explicitly
> beforehand.

It seems we already had such a check, but it was not done correctly.
This is fixed by patch 2 below.

> > The commit message I wrote is now lost. This is bad behaviour - the error
> > should happen before one writes the commit message, or the message should be
> > saved somewhere.
> 
> It's not lost. It's in .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG.
> 
> We could probably do a better job of informing the user of this when
> commit dies prematurely.

And patch 3 improves this situation.

  [1/3]: advice: pass varargs to strbuf_vaddf, not strbuf_addf
  [2/3]: commit: check committer identity more strictly
  [3/3]: commit: give a hint when a commit message has been abandoned

-Peff