[patch] Use /etc/mailname if available

[John A Meinel]

Aaron Bentley wrote:
> John A Meinel wrote:
>>> Honestly, though. The email address is only for personal use. bzr uses
>>> it a little bit so that it can help ensure unique ids, but really the
>>> datestamp and random number provide the uniqueness.
> 
> I think it uses it because it's conventional to have a committer field
> in commits, and so it guesses the best one it can.  I don't think it was
> ever about unique ids.
> 
> We could just require the user to set an email address if bzr can't find
> a reasonable one (e.g. by checking EMAIL), but that would turn our
> 3-step startup into a 4-step one.  But using the wrong committer ID is
> perhaps serious enough that we should do it.
> 
> Aaron

Well, cvs and subversion just use the username. But they don't worry
about being correct across multiple repositories.

user at hostname

Is technically correct. Though I guess it should really be "user at fqdn".

If the only reason we aren't using "getfqdn()" is because it is slow on
Mac, I would say that we should just use it. And let people know that
supplying an explicit email address means it will be faster, because it
doesn't have to do the lookup.
Either that, or just cache the information somehow. It would be nice if
bzr wasn't slow for people who just wanted to play with it, and see if
they like it.

Also, if you include the admin overhead, bzr is *way* faster to setup
than svn. The problem is most people will come to it with everything
already setup by the admin. And I don't know that we have a good way to
do that for bzr.
Perhaps a "bzr initialize" plugin, which interactively (possibly with a
simple gui) helps you setup the stuff you care about and get going.

John
=:->

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