Using Fake Alias Emails for signing Edits and Merges?

How to Use GitLab
1

I do not want to use a real email for signing any changes at all because the emails id tend to change (and that messes up the repo).

To that purpose, I tried changing the primary e-mail id but that sends a confirmation mail. On the other hand it says on the https://gitlab.com/profile/emails that “Your Primary Email will be used for avatar detection and web based operations, such as edits and merges” which I guess implies that I cannot use the fake alias for signing anything done from the web-console.

Is there any way out of this. Thanks in advance!

2

Email addresses aren’t used for signing things.

git uses the identify to tag each commit.
gitlab uses the email address to email you information about (that you can ask or turn off).

The two are not the same thing and you can use a real or fake with each one – although saying I want to keep a clean repo by putting in fake data is an odd one.

3

I think I have not explained myself well enough.

Suppose, I were to make change to your repo from the web interface. This is tagged by git using the primary email address provided in gitlab. However when I am working on the repo on my PC I use fake@user.email to tag my commits. This is a problem especially when working from the web-interface - I want git to use fake@user.email for that as well.

Effectively what I am saying is that I somehow want gitlab web interface to set git config --global user.email "fake@user.email" not git config user.email "<primary email>" as it seems to be the case. SO MY QUESTION: Is there some way at all I can do that??

Also re odd thing let me explain - I want to be consistent keeping the fake email because:

  1. I have had real emails close on me in the past and I am not bothered enough to setup my own domain - and the developer sees my old email in the commit history where I cannot be reached and may even be now owned by someone else (at least this way they know that I am me and unreachable here).
  2. I want to avoid spam.
4

Gitlab AFAIK does not have any mapping or multiple email functions.

The user decides what email address they want to use with each repo

However

git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"

You can omit the --global to set the value per repo. Otherwise you would have to create a set of global hook files and in your .gitconfig file check to see which user.email and user.name should be set for each repo.

5

Sorry, this has been an eternity but I finally got around to creating an example…

In the repo https://gitlab.com/cxres/test you will see that I have made two commits.

The first is the Readme file that was created from the Gitlab UI. This has the email set to cxres@protonmail.com which is what I have set in the profile pages of GitLab.
The second commit I have made is from the command line on my home pc. Here my --global is set as a rahul.gupta@user.email which is what you see in the second commit.

In my ideal scenario, even if I commit from the GitLab web UI, I want my email to be the fake one (Using the UI is nice for doing things like initializations and merges sometimes and free email accounts tend to be ephemeral). So can I do this? If not, are the good folks at GitLab willing to consider this feature?