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The arch Global Name-space of Users

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For various purposes (such as labelling the author of log messages), arch maintains a global name-space of users. Every user of arch has an associated user ID, which is (ideally) globally unique.

An id string has two parts: a free-form part, and a unique-id part. The unique-id part is an email address with a fully-qualified domain name. That part of your id string should be unique to you in the world. Here is an example:

             Joe Hacker <joe.hacker@gnu.org>
                ^               ^
                |               |
           free form part     unique id

The free-form part must match the regexp:

        [[:alnum:][:space:][:punct:]]*

and the unique-id part must match the regexp:

        <[-.[:alnum:]]+@[-.[:alnum:]]+\\.[-.[:alnum:]]+>

You should only need to set your ID once, which you can do with the command:

        % larch my-id ID-STRING

You can check your id with:

        % larch my-id
        Joe Hacker <joe.hacker@gnu.org>

or:

        % larch my-id --uid
        joe.hacker@gnu.org

Clearly it is a good idea to use a real email address (belonging to you) for the id string, but there is nothing that requires this.

arch: The arch Revision Control System
The Hackerlab at regexps.com