git commit ignoring email in global config and using hostname instead

Question

I have an issue similar to this where my laptop was using me<my_emal> for commits, laptop catastrophically died, got new laptop, reinstalled Wheezy, stuck old drive in new laptop and my commits now use me<local_hostname>

My git config has the entries

[user]
name = me
email = myemail

I have tried the command

print_env

but GIT_AUTHOR_NAME and GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL are not set.

Of the suggested commands

git config --system -l
git config --global -l
git config --local -l

only --global has user.name and user.email set and it is correct, --system reports /etc/gitconfig does not exist and --local has no entries for user* ie no user/email entries in my-repo/.git/config only in ~/.gitconfig .

 grep -R GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL / 2>/dev/null

returns a bunch of results but does not explicitly set it to hostname

As a result this now breaks my building using git-buildpackage as the key to use is me<my_email> not me<hostname> .

I also spotted this on the package building side (which led me to the above post) but that's only for after the commit.

Running out of ideas now.

Answer 1

Setting null string in local repository is not valid

Hi, my case was your special case. (Please be tolerant if this answer was not you intended.)

Prerequisite

(OS X 10.10.5, git version 2.5.4 (Apple Git-61)/git version 2.7.0 from Homebrew)

Settings

The local repository had only null string like bellow! In this case, GIT_AUTHOR_IDENT set to `id -F`<`logname`@`hostname`> (I thought old git version 1.9 or so was effective with this configuration though)

localrepo/.config

[user]
name = ""
email = ""

$HOME/.config

[user]
name = me
email = myemail

Intention

I didn't want to log user.email. and user.name.

Maybe what you said

no entries for user* ie no user/email entries in my-repo/.git/config only in ~/.gitconfig

is actually like above?

Solution

localrepo/.config

[user]
name = " "
email = " "

A space was effective to achieve my intention.