title: Handling git on a shared user account
body: <p>I'm using <code>git</code> to track changes to a series of system configuration file on a server. These files are owned by the <code>root</code> account (and for various internal enterprise-y reasons, root is the only account on this box).</p>
  
  <p>There is a central git server, which all changes made on this system are being pushed to.</p>
  
  <p>What I'm trying to do is suppress the warning that <code>git</code> throws because there isn't a user account set. What we do is, anyone changing a file under git control simply sets the <code>--author</code> option when they do the commit - however, git still complains that the user information isn't set.</p>
  
  <p>For detail, the exact message is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[root@server ~]# git commit --author "Karunamon &lt;karunamon@company.com&gt;"
  [master 491d9f8] File updated
   Author: Karunamon &lt;Karunamon@company.com&gt;
   Committer: root &lt;root@server&gt;
  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 you@example.com
  
  After doing this, you may fix the identity used for this commit with:
  
      git commit --amend --reset-author
  
   1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So basically, this is a twofold question:</p>
  
  <p>First, <strong>Is there a way to squelch this warning message?</strong> Setting the config variable is going to end in confusion since there will be a number of people accessing this same repository on this server under the root account.</p>
  
  <p>I did try using the environment variables (<code>GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL</code>, <code>GIT_AUTHOR_NAME</code>, etc), but the same message comes up.</p>
  
  <p>Second, <strong>Is there a better way</strong> (short of some horrid hack involving an .rc file and asking on login) to set the user name and email so that my users don't have to add an <code>--author</code> flag to every commit?</p>
  
  <p>The environment variable option would have been perfect - I could just have my users export the variables on login and then they're good until next connect.. but git still whines.</p>