Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] commit: show interesting ident information in summary

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:48:53 -0800

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> Just adding the "Committer:" reminder is slightly annoying (though
> perhaps some people will even like it). Adding a big advice message on
> every commit is going to be annoying to everyone who sees it, and is
> really crossing the line of "we don't really support implicit identities
> anymore", since anyone seeing it is going to want to fix it.
>
> I know there has been some discussion of that area in the last few
> months, but I admit I didn't pay any attention. Is that the direction we
> want to move in? I don't have a particular problem with it, but I want
> to point out that if there _are_ people who really like the implicit
> ident feature, we are effectively killing it off for them.

Traditionally, we've only had a minimal sanity check (e.g. to barf when
the name is empty, or something silly like that) and tried to come up with
a reasonable name/email given the available system information.

In olden days, `whoami`@`hostname`, at least on systems that were
competently maintained, gave a reasonable mail address for most people,
but I think it stopped being adequate more than 10 years ago, and it is
not useful anymore to majority of people, especially the ones who work on
Open Source projects as individuals, whose desired public identities are
often tied to their email account at their ISPs or mailbox providers (like
gmail).  There is no way for us to guess, when `whoami`@`hostname -f` is
the only thing we can go by without explicit user configuration.

Inside corporate environments, `whoami`@`hostname -f` might still be a
reasonable and usable default, though.

So I think the safest thing to do would be to give a big advice but make
it squelch-able with advice.howToSetYourIdentity or something.