Re: GIT_CONFIG - what's the point?

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

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.

Thanks anyway.

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 8:38 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 08:54:26PM -0400, Matthew Persico wrote:
>
>> So, what's the point of GIT_CONFIG if only git-config uses it? Or did
>> I miss a step?
>
> There isn't a point to it. It's historical cruft that has been left in
> to avoid breaking older scripts. The same thing is generally better
> accomplished by using git-config's "--file" parameter. We should
> probably do a better job of making that clear in the documentation.
>
> Or possibly deprecate it and eventually remove it entirely, as discussed
> in:
>
>   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.bugs.general/1195694/focus=257770
>
> -Peff



-- 
Matthew O. Persico