Re: Git Rebase blows away GIT_AUTHOR_NAME

[Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 5:21 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 05:13:59PM +0100, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
>
>> > The three-letter minimum is just a sanity check. If your name really
>> > is even just three letters, I suspect you're just lying. I don't know
>> > of anybody named "A B".
>> >
>> Thanks for clarifying that it's not there for a technical reason. The
>> thing is, git-am seems to be the only place where such a sanity-check
>> is performed. Shouldn't git-commit rather perform such checks also (if
>> such a check should be done at all), perhaps with an override similar
>> to --allow-empty? And on top of all it doesn't barf, it just silently
>> replace the name with the e-mail...
>
> I tend to agree with Linus on the stupidity issue, but I do worry about
> the subtlety of the results. It causes silent data corruption during a
> rebase (or when somebody is applying an emailed patch). On the other
> hand, I do understand why Linus made a sanity check in the first place;
> his use case is to deal with whatever crap people happen to mail him,
> whether they have used git or not.
>
> So we should probably do one or both of:
>
>  1. Make an --allow-any-name option to mailinfo, and use it when we
>     invoke mailinfo internally for rebasing. That still doesn't solve
>     the emailed patch problem, but at least keeps purely internal
>     operations sane.
>
>  2. Bump the check up to git-commit time, which is the best place to
>     catch and tell somebody that their name is too short, because they
>     can actually fix it.
>

The problem with (2) is that git-am uses git-commit-tree rather than
git-commit. But I do think that adding the same checks to git-commit
would make sense. Unless we decide to remove the checks, that is...