Git: name and email address configuration

Question

Once in a while I get the message shown below from Git. My questions regarding this are:

1. Why does this happen?
2. How can I prevent this from happening again?
3. How does this affect my commits or any other Git actions I may take?

I realize similar questions have been posted to Stack Overflow, but I don't believe they address this message in particular.

---

Your name and email address were configured automatically based on your username and hostname. Please check that they are accurate. You can suppress this message by setting them explicitly:

git config --global user.name "Your Name" git config --global user.email [email protected] 

After doing this, you may fix the identity used for this commit with:

git commit --amend --reset-author 

Answer 1

Git simply detects you don't have the following section in your config files:

[user]     name = <your name>     email = <your mail> 

• <project_path>/.git/config for the project specific config file.
• ~/.gitconfig the global config file

When you do:

git config --global user.name "Your Name" git config --global user.email [email protected] 

Git writes that information into the configuration file (--global means in the global config file).

To have a the correct Author section in a commit like the following example commit:

commit 79eeaa9f22321580a0e5bee6e237331691cd3b68 Author: Sandro Munda <[email protected]> Date:   Thu Jun 8 10:40:05 2012 +0200      My first commit 

You need to reset the commit information with the command:

git commit --amend --reset-author