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

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Aug 09, 2013 at 11:40:56PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> Jeff King wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I don't fully follow.  Do you mean that because other operating
> systems choose not to make full use of an /etc/mailname file when it
> is present (and instead use per-MTA configuration), git should not
> take advantage of it to choose an appropriate email address?
> 
> Or do you mean that on non-Debian systems, the FQDN for localhost is
> reliably the mailname, just like on Debian systems /etc/mailname is
> supposed to be?

Sorry to be unclear. I meant that treating /etc/mailname and gethostname
differently might be justified on Debian under the logic "if you have
/etc/mailname, that is a trustworthy address, and if you do not, then we
cannot guess at a trustworthy address (because putting it in
/etc/mailname is the accepted way to do so on Debian)".

But such logic would not extend to other operating systems, where
/etc/mailname does not have such a status.

I am guessing, too, about what people even put in /etc/mailname. If they
relay mail from the machine to a smarthost, do they put the individual
hostname into /etc/mailname? Or do they put in the domain name that
represents a real deliverable address? If the former, then it is no
better than gethostname anyway.

-Peff