Comment 2 for bug 648496

This is easily reproducable:
1) Make sure you don't have whoami info (bzr whoami "")
2) Try to run quickly create ubuntu-application test

It seems that nowadays bzr won't let you commit without whoami info. I don't recall that was always the case. One solution would be to grab the user's information from launchpad and fill it out during the create step. That would be ideal because then the information would match what they will eventually push to LP. It might feel a little odd though, to be hitting LP just to create a local project...