Re: Patch: FYI: add real name property

[Bryce McKinlay <mckinlay at redhat dot com>]

Ranjit Mathew wrote:
> Tom Tromey wrote:
>   
> > The Eclipse ChangeLog plugin wants to know the user's real name, but,
> > strangely, there is no Java system property for this.  I don't see why
> > we shouldn't provide this as a GNU extension.  This is both useful and
> > safe, as code can easily check for the property's existence at
> > runtime.
> >     
>
> I strongly suspect it will want to know the email address of
> the user as well. :-)
>
> If a plugin can have configurable properties, why not have
> the name and the email address the user wants to use for a
> given project be properties to be configured by the user for
> the plugin for that project?
>   

I thought that to - guessing an email using username@host is almost 
never the right thing to do. For portability, the plugin should present 
its configuration dialog the first time these properties are required. 
Even better would be if Eclipse provided a global configuration from 
which the plugin can pull these settings.

Still, it probably doesn't hurt to make this property available as a 
default - except that it might make the plugin developers lazy :)

Bryce