Comment 3 for bug 549310

I have been bitten by this issue in much the same way as John describes.

Basically, I do my changes on Linux. Switch to a windows machine test something and forget that I haven't really done a 'bzr whoami <email address hidden>' there. After doing some minor fix I checkin. The problem is that at that point I don't even realize that the checkin was from testlogin@testpc. Some time later, my lauchpad branch view says 'X commit by 2 people' and I have not idea whats going on as I am the only committer to the project :-)

I think at a minimum commit actions should at least give a warning if some default user is being user.

However, personally I would also prefer an error say something like 'Please use `bzr whoami "First Last <email address hidden>"` to set user id for commit' as it may be better to fail and inform the user of the bzr whoami command rather than add a bad name to the commit and expect him to undo. In the above example which I quoted, I discovered the problem while viewing the branch in launchpad after a whole lot of commits so there wasn't much I could do about it.

Also, this causes plugins like lp:bzr-stats to give inaccurate results.