git : empty ident name (for <>) not allowed

Question

I was applying a diff file of an opensource project on the top of my repository using git-am :

 git am -3 < /Downloads/refactorWork.diff 

but it had conflicts and i had to resolve them; but after resolving the conflicts and staging them, when i did git am --continue i got :

fatal : empty ident name (for <>) not allowed 

I looked up on the internet and found this which seemed to be similar to my problem but my usename and email were already added up in global and local git directories. Here is the output of git config list :

rohan@~/Documents/libo : $ git config --global --list [email protected] user.name=Rohan Kumar alias.l=log --oneline --graph --pretty credential.helper=cache 

Although i solved this by first commiting the staged changes and then using git am --skip, I am interested in knowing what does that error means and whether what i did was the correct way of doing it, or is there any better way?

Answer 1

This diff file is a plain diff, not something generated by git format-patch. A format-patch generated diff contains information about the commit author, author date, commit message, ... and maintains this information when creating the commit(s).

Your plain diff does not have these information, so git am will complain that it is missing naturally.

You should instead have used git apply which is meant to apply simple patch files like you have in this case which will only apply the patch to the worktree (and index if you tell it to) but does not create any commit automatically.