auto guess committer email.. good idea?

[James Blackwell]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 03:07:43PM +0100, Erik Bågfors wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I'm not a big fan of the fact that bzr tries to guess the committer
> email. I think lot's of people will commit with "Foo Bar
> <foo at hostname>"... and that's most likely not what they want.

As somebody else mentioned, I think this was brought up in the past.  I'm
for keeping the current behaviour. The current behaviour means that no
installation is required in order to get started. 

Its kind of cool that somebody can start using bzr today without having to
go through any setup investment. Sure, that means that the earlier
revisions for someone are going to have things like "Owner at nibbles".
Though people later fix their email address for newer revisions, I haven't
detected any sort of stress when it comes to the stored email address for
older revisions.

> I see two choices.  Give a message saying "you have not set your email
> address, set it like this: <explanation>".... or do what darcs does
> and ask.

I think that there's four, ordered by the ways I think are easiest for
users.

 1. Leave it alone.
 2. Politely remind user that email address isn't open.
 3. Ask for the email address
 4. Bomb out if email address isn't set

> : [bagfors at zyrgelkwyt]$ ; darcs rec -am foo
> Darcs needs to know what name (conventionally an email address) to use as the
> patch author, e.g. 'Fred Bloggs <fred at bloggs.invalid>'.  If you provide one
> now it will be stored in the file '_darcs/prefs/author' and used as a default
> in the future.  To change your preferred author address, simply delete or edit
> this file.
> 
> What is your email address?
> ----
> 
> And then store this info as the committer for this branch.
> 
> I personally don't like the darcs way very much.
> 
> If people do a large install (on a system with multiple users) where
> the guess is always correct, then it's a good idea to be able to turn
> this on globally for that installation, but for most small/personal
> installations, it's wrong.
> 
> /Erik

-- 
My home page:   <a href="http://jblack.linuxguru.net">James Blackwell</a>
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