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

Jeff King [off-list ref] 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.

Another option could to add an option to control the strictness. We
usually have a chicken-and-egg problem here with individual installs
(i.e., any person who could set "user.trustHostname = false" could just
as easily have set "user.email"). But in an institutional setting, the
admin could set such a config in /etc/gitconfig for everybody. Or for a
system like Debian, the packager could include the option, knowing that
any reasonably configured system should have /etc/mailname set up (which
is not something we can necessarily count on for other operating
systems).

-Peff