2.3.2 beta 4 changed my git name to my github username

Describe the bug

Upgrading from 2.3.2-beta3 to 2.3.2-beta4 changed my name from Brian Surowiec to xt0rted. I noticed this after updating and rebasing, now all the changed commits say Brian surowiec authored and xt0rted committed.

Version & OS

• 2.3.2-beta4
• Windows 10

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Start with a version prior to 2.3.2-beta4
2. Under Git Options set your name
3. Update to 2.3.2-beta4
4. Look under Git Options and your name should be different

Expected behavior

Leave my name as-is

Actual behavior

Changed my name to my GitHub username without any warning or notice

Logs

Nothing in the log or devtools mentions this setting change

[billygriffin]

I think a better approach would be to remove the automatic pre-fill from the preferences dialog while still keeping it in the welcome flow. Those are my initial thoughts that I thought worth capturing for future reference.

I agree with this suggestion from @niik - I’m curious your thoughts @ampinsk. Basically the welcome flow would still prefill the Git info with your username and email from GitHub, but after that the preferences dialog doesn’t do anything special with those fields other than showing them and allowing you to change them manually if you so choose.

[niik]

@xt0rted Thanks so much for troubleshooting and getting back to us so quickly! While not ideal I believe this behavior has existed for a very long time. The overall implementation of falling back to the account login/name was introduced 3 years ago in https://github.com/desktop/desktop/commit/9aff0e6d655c3a8955e0dbda661143441d6e1cd4.

Given that this is a long-standing issue and given that I suspect that the use of config include directives are extremely rare among our users I don’t think this is something we should attempt to address for the next release.

Allow myself to solutionize for just a second however I’d say that while we could attempt to respect include directives either using the --include flag or by means of relying on --list plus --show-origin I fear such attempts will be brittle at best due to the complexity involved and I think a better approach would be to remove the automatic pre-fill from the preferences dialog while still keeping it in the welcome flow. Those are my initial thoughts that I thought worth capturing for future reference.