Comment 3 for bug 1297559

Got it. git (at least in trusty) does not copy over the repo configs when doing a clone, so user.email and user.name do not get copied from the source repository. And since $HOME is not set, --global is not referenced. And in environments where the hosts domain name is not set e.g. trusty (cloud-init change between precise and trusty?), git tries and fails to set a default email address, and we go into this loop.

The referenced branch fixes this by setting user.name and user.email directly when cloning a git repo. Please consider applying this to the 1.18 line, as the problem severely breaks 1.18+trusty+(openstack, possibly others).