Subject: Re: "commit --author=..." does not work if global email and name is not set

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2019 13:06:47 +0200

Piotr Krukowiecki <[email-masked]> writes:

>> On Sat, Apr 6, 2019 at 8:25 PM Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Better though is to focus on what you want, namely to prevent accidental
>>> commits without specified author, instead of how you want to achieve it,
>>> i.e. using --author to provide both author and committer identity (the
>>> XY problem).  On that machine with "automatic test account" set up
>>> pre-commit or commit-msg hook that fails if the GIT_AUTHOR_IDENT
>>> environment variable is not the "automatic test account".
>
> I'm not sure if I follow you. I want to be able to make both "real
> user" and "automatic test account user" commits from that machine. I
> want to make sure that:
> - automatic commits (scripts) use their own account
> - real person making commit uses their own account
>
> IMO the only way this can be achieved is by not having any default
> account setup, so that both the scripts and the real users need to
> specify it "by hand".

If a real person making commits uses their own account (just on that
machine), he or she can set up `user.name` and `user.email` settings in
the per-user Git configuration file with

  $ git config --global user.name  "My Name"
  $ git config --global user.email [email-masked]

If however one is doing commits from the "automatic test user" account,
then the `pre-commit` or `commit-msg` hook configured for that specific
repository for that automatic account would be run, which can detect
that the commit was not done with

  $ git commit --author="My Name <[email-masked]>"

The additional advantage is that you can examine committer data to
detect such cases of committing out of automatic account.

I hope that helps,
--
Jakub Narębski