Control Freak: more accurate suggestion for bad committer metadata

[Dávid Csákvári]

In our environment we have the “Committer must be current logged-in User” policy enabled, which occasionally results in the following error message:

remote: Control Freak
remote: -----
remote: Commit <SHA> rejected: bad committer metadata.
remote: "name user@domain" does not match your
remote: credentials. You are logged in as: "name user@domain".
remote: To see the bad commit's metadata:
remote:
remote: git show -s --pretty=fuller <SHA>
remote:
remote: Have "name user@domain" push their own commits.
remote: Or use the following git commands to fix Git configuration:
remote:
remote: git config --global user.name "name"
remote: git config --global user.email user@domain
remote: git rebase --force-rebase
remote:
remote: Note: the rebase will drop unpushed merges. Usually that's fine.
remote: -----

The hint on how the fix the problematic commits is working in many cases.

However, when there’s no tracking branch in place yet, git rebase --force-rebase fails, because it expects a branch name:

git rebase --force-rebase
There is no tracking information for the current branch.
Please specify which branch you want to rebase against.
See git-rebase(1) for details.
git rebase <branch>
If you wish to set tracking information for this branch you can do so with:
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/<branch> mybranch

In my experience many people are confused by Git’s response in this case.

Would it be possible to return a different error message, based on if it’s a branch creation attempt or not?

For example, it would return the current hint when there’s an existing branch:

remote: git config --global user.name "name"
remote: git config --global user.email user@domain
remote: git rebase --force-rebase

But it would return a slightly different one if there’s none:

remote: git config --global user.name "name"
remote: git config --global user.email user@domain
remote: git rebase --force-rebase master

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[Julius Davies [bit-booster.com]]

This is a fantastic enhancement request. Yes, we’ll do this. I wonder if our instructions can identify a good fork point to use for the rebase (“master” aka the repository’s default branch is a good heuristic, but not bullet-proof enough in my opinion).

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