From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/6] var: provide explicit/implicit ident information
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:06:57 -0800
Message-ID: <20121114170657.GC6858@elie.Belkin>
References: <20121113164845.GD20361@sigill.intra.peff.net>
 <20121113165308.GD12626@sigill.intra.peff.net>
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Cc: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>, git@vger.kernel.org,
	Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>,
	Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
To: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
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Jeff King wrote:

> 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.

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).

Thanks,
Jonathan