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

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Aug 09, 2013 at 04:06:16PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > Yeah, there are basically three levels of ident:
> >
> >   1. The user told us explicitly (e.g., $EMAIL, user.email). Trust it.
> >
> >   2. We guessed and it looks reasonable (e.g., hostname is FQDN). Warn
> >      but use it.
> >
> >   3. It looks obviously bogus (e.g., we do not have a domain name).
> >      Reject it.
> >
> > We can move some cases from (2) down to (3), like ...
> 
> Judging from Thorsten's earlier response, I am afraid no amount of
> autodetection would help the users of that site.  If we were to do
> something, /etc/gitconfig as you outlined below would be the way to
> go, even though it makes me feel dirty.

It was not clear to me whether his site has /etc/mailname. If it does
not, then the new rule could be to leave "/etc/mailname" in group 2, and
put "gethostname/gethostbyname" into group 3 (right now we do so only
when the results from those functions are obviously not
fully-qualified).

But from his description, the machine may even have a split-horizon name
in /etc/mailname, and we can do nothing at all about that.

Even if it worked, though, I am not sure it would be worth such a rule.
The /etc/mailname file is not a standard, so you would effectively be
cutting off the auto-ident behavior for people on every other system. If
we are going to do that, we might as well do it uniformly.

-Peff