Re: Git snafu

[Jim Porter]

On 5/1/2023 5:44 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:13:50 -0700
> > From: Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>
> > Cc: eliz@gnu.org
> >
> > In fact, we can do something even simpler than that: just set the config
> > option "user.useConfigOnly" to true. See attached. Does this look ok to
> > everyone?
>
> How do we know no one is using several email accounts, and would like
> to avoid the annoyance of being prompted by Git?

I *do* use several email accounts, and this setting works properly for 
me. My normal configuration is to have something like this in my 
~/.gitconfig (repeated for a few other directories):

  # Set user info for repos inside ~/src
  [includeIf "gitdir:~/src/"]
    path = ~/src/.gitconfig

Then, in my Emacs clone, I override my email address again (to this 
one). With this combination of settings, everything works exactly as 
expected with "user.useConfigOnly" set.

I can also set the author of a single commit via "git commit --author" 
with "user.useConfigOnly" set (so that option is arguably a bit of a 
misnomer; from reading the documentation[1], it really only means "don't 
guess the user information").

Similarly, if I wanted to set the *committer*, I could use:

  git -c user.name=Foo -c user.email=foo@example.com commit ...

The only time a *new* error occurs (that I can see, anyway) is if you 
completely skip configuring your user info *anywhere*. Then, "git 
commit" or "git commit --author" will fail (the latter fails because Git 
still had to guess the *committer*). In this case, you can just use "git 
-c user.name ..." as described above, and all is well.

All that said, I agree that this problem is a rare enough circumstance 
that we probably don't really *need* to make my suggested change. I 
think it's a low-risk change, but I won't be upset if we just leave 
things as they are.

[1] 
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config.txt-useruseConfigOnly