Re: [PATCH 1/2] drop length limitations on gecos-derived names and emails

On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 09:54:37PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Of course we've still polluted this crappy fake name into
git_default_name, so that later calls with error_on_no_name will see it
and not error. I think so far it hasn't mattered because the only user
of this "warn" code is format-patch, which otherwise does not care about
ident (and doesn't even end up using the name at all!). And I doubt this
code path gets triggered much anyway; do people really run
"GIT_COMMITTER_NAME= git format-patch"?

I can just leave it as it's not really hurting anybody, I think. But I
was refactoring in the area and it just seemed flaky and questionable. I
wonder if we can simply get rid of the IDENT_WARN_ON_NO_NAME code path
entirely. The use here is grabbing the email address to use as part of a
message id. Could we just call setup_ident and then read from
git_default_email directly? There's no need to respect
GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL here at all.

Hmm, I was mistaken. This code path also gets followed whenever
IDENT_ERROR_ON_NO_NAME is not set (regardless of IDENT_WARN_ON_NO_NAME).
So other programs may accidentally get this pollution of
git_default_name and show a username when we _could_ have shown the name
from config. I can see the pollution in a debugger in "git commit", but
I don't think you can actually trigger a commit with it, because later
calls to fmt_ident use ERROR_ON_NO_NAME.

I really wonder if we can just get rid of all of the calls which do not
use ERROR_ON_NO_NAME. As far as I can tell, they are all part of
programs which later end up using ERROR_ON_NO_NAME anyway.

-Peff