Re: [PATCH 0/2] config includes, take 2

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 08:24:42PM +0100, Jakub Narebski wrote:

> > So the patch would look something like this. However, is the actual
> > filename really what callers want? It seems like in David's case, an
> > annotation of "repo", "global", or "system" (possibly in addition to the
> > filename) would be the most useful (because in the git-cola UI, it is
> > still nice to list things as "repo" or "global" instead of spewing the
> > whole filename at the user -- but you would still want the individual
> > filename for handling updates of includes).
> 
> I'm not sure if "system" / "global" / "local" or "repo" would be a good
> idea.
> 
> First, in the case of includes you would have to provide pathnames of
> included files.  This would introduce inconsistency.  Is "system"
> the '/etc/gitconfig' file, or 'system' file in '.git' directory?

Yeah, it would have to be syntactically unambiguous with the filename.
I was thinking something of just including both, like this:

  global:/home/peff/.gitconfig<TAB>include.path=other-file
  global:/home/peff/other-file<TAB>some.key=value

That is, give a "context" (repo, global, system) to each lookup, and
then mention the individual file as well (either because it is the root
of that context, or because it was included). So a config editor could
present the context to the user as a purely decorative thing (i.e., tell
the user "these options affect all of your repos"), but use the filename
to actually update the values (i.e., "git config -f
/home/peff/other-file some.key newvalue").

> Second, people can have different build configuration, e.g. the prefix
> might differ, so that "system" is not always '/etc/gitconfig'.  If you
> want to edit config you would want to know which file to edit... and though
> there is "git config --system --edit" it depends on having editor
> configured correctly.

Without includes, something like git-cola could possibly get away with:

  git config --system some.key value

but that doesn't work for included files; for those, you'd want to have
the actual filename.

-Peff