Re: GIT_CONFIG - what's the point?

[Matthew Persico <matthew.persico@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 1:28 PM, SZEDER Gábor <szeder@ira.uka.de> wrote:
>> Let me explain my scenario. I have an nfs mounted home directory. It
>> is used across multiple machines. I use different colored xterms for
>> each machine. But that means that the one set of colors in my one
>> .gitconfig file don't work against all my screen backgrounds. I'm
>> trying to find a way to tune the git colors per login. The ability to
>> set colors in an environment variable (like most UNIX utils support)
>> would be the easiest way to do this. Failing that, I was hoping that
>> by setting GIT_CONFIG per login, I could tune the color schemes with
>> different config files.
>>
>> Since that is not how GIT_CONFIG is used, I have simply decided to
>> squint where necessary, or open up a neutral colored xterm for the
>> diff, regardless of machine.
>>
>> Yes, I could probably do diffs in many other ways, but git diff at the
>> command line is usually the most expedient.
>>
>> Unless I wanted to define a GIT_CONFIG_OVER environment variable upon
>> login, place inside it the appropriate -c<name>=<value> overrides for
>> colors, and then define a bash function git as
>>
>> git () {
>>    $(which git) $GIT_CONFIG_OVER "$@"
>>    return $?
>> }
>>
>> which seems silly.
>
> Yeah, that 'return $?' at the end of the function does indeed seem
> silly :)  (sorry, couldn't resist...)
Part OCD, part OAC. :-)

>
> You could use machine-specific config includes instead of that
> GIT_CONFIG_OVER environment variable.  I.e. store machine-specific
> color configuration in ~/.gitcolors.<machine> or something and define
> the shell function as:
>
> git () {
>         command git -c include.path=~/.gitcolors.$HOSTNAME "$@"
> }
BINGO! THAT was the redirection I needed! One thing I was trying to
figure out early one was how to put HOSTNAME-based include.path-s in
the .gitconfig. So I put them OUTSIDE the .gitconfig like this.

Much obliged. Next time you are in NYC - I owe you a beer!

>
> The impact on your .bashrc would be much smaller than with the
> GIT_CONFIG_OVER approach.
> You could even turn this into an alias, if you want.
>
>



-- 
Matthew O. Persico