[darcs-users] Can We Change Default Author Behavior?

[Max Battcher]

Dan Shafer wrote:
> Is there a setting somewhere in darcs that would make it possible for us 
> to require each developer who creates changes to supply his identity 
> explicitly as part of a record process? Too often, developers on my team 
> accept the default and that makes it impossible for me to trace the 
> actual change agent.

I'm not entirely certain what scenario you are dealing with.

Are you talking about in their own repositories?  If your developers are 
not using good .darcs/author, _darcs/prefs/author, $DARCS_EMAIL, and/or 
$EMAIL settings, then you should talk to your developers and it takes 
only a few seconds to fix and a _darcs/prefs/author file is incredibly 
easy to keep up to date.  It's pretty goofy for a developer not to give 
a correct email address when Darcs prompts for it (generally only once 
ever on the first record in a repository, because it saves it to 
_darcs/prefs/author), and I've never seen that myself and I certainly 
wouldn't accept a patch into main/stable/shared repository without an 
email address on it.

On the other hand, if you are having problems with records from shared 
repositories...  First of all you should rarely/never have records from 
multiple developers made directly in shared repositories.  In Darcs 
every developer should have at least one "personal" copy of a 
repository.  If you absolutely need to have developers recording from 
the same repo (and again this doesn't make much "sense" when using 
Darcs), you can create some simple cron job to remove the 
_darcs/prefs/author file every so often...

-- 
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/