Re: [PATCH 4/6] var: provide explicit/implicit ident information

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 09:06:57AM -0800, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Jeff King wrote:

quoted

Internally, we keep track of whether the author or committer
ident information was provided by the user, or whether it
was implicitly determined by the system. However, there is
currently no way for external programs or scripts to get
this information

What are the intended semantics?  If my machine has /etc/mailname
filled out, is that an implicit identity?  How about if I set the
EMAIL envvar but not GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL?

If external scripts are going to start using this mechanism, they will
need answers to these questions to support users that run into
configuration problems.  A few words on this in the documentation
could probably help.

The intent is to make git's internal rules (whatever they may be)
available to calling scripts. But I agree those rules should be spelled
out now that they are becoming a more visible interface. I'll update the
documentation.

On most machines I have the EMAIL envvar set explicitly, but in the
recent past I relied on /etc/mailname on some others, so I'm also
genuinely curious about the use case here (and too lazy to dig it up).

Right now EMAIL is explicit, but `id`@`cat /etc/mailname` is not. I
think changing that would be a separate issue, though (and I'm not sure
whether it is a good idea; my /etc/mailname is not an email address I
would want to use).

-Peff