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

Jonathan Nieder [off-list ref] writes:

Hi Thorsten,

Thorsten Glaser wrote[1]:

quoted

git config user.email SHOULD NOT default to $(id -un)@$(hostname -f)
because just too many cow-orkers seem to be unable to follow basic
instructions

Heh.

Can you say a little more about your setup?  In a university
environment with sysadmin-managed email and /etc/mailname set up
correctly it is handy that people can start working without doing
anything special to configure git's "[user] email" setting.

I also work with a university environment. The guessed user.email is
almost right (actually, it's not the official email address, but an
internal one we ask students not to use). Still, I'd love to see Git
error out by default, as most students use Git from several machines.
They usually learn and write their first ~/.gitconfig on the school's
machines, and then start working from their personal laptops, where the
guessed user.email is plain wrong.

We do teach them to set user.email in ~/.gitconfig as a very first step,
but many don't (because they don't read the tutorial, or because they do
something wrong like putting .gitconfig in the wrong directory). We do
tell them to set up ~/.gitconfig on every host they work from, but many
don't either. And unfortunately, the warning is not scary enough for
some of them :-\ ("Err, did I get a warning? where?").

An opt-in auto-detection would be cool for people who really work in a
controlled environment, so that the sysadmin could enable it from
/etc/gitconfig.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/

Matthieu Moy dixit:

An opt-in auto-detection would be cool for people who really work in a
controlled environment, so that the sysadmin could enable it from

Sounds like a plan ;-)

I think with several people chiming in on this, while that proposal
would affect a majority of people, it would do so in a less intrusive
way as the current behaviour of autodetection which negatively affects
some users, although not few either, in a strong way.

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 

emacs als auch vi zum Kotzen finde (joe rules) und pine für den einzig
bedienbaren textmode-mailclient halte (und ich hab sie alle ausprobiert). ;)

Hallooooo, ich bin der Holger ("Hallo Holger!"), und ich bin ebenfalls
... pine-User, und das auch noch gewohnheitsmäßig ("Oooooooohhh").  [aus dasr]