Re: [PATCH/RFC/GSoC 0/2] add a add.patch config variable

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Dominik,

On Thu, 21 Apr 2016, Dominik Fischer wrote:

> Indeed this needs more explanations for everyone who did not read the posts
> before.

Such as is the case for me. And most future readers of the commit messages
;-)

> I strove to create an add.patch configuration option that did the same as
> always passing the parameter --patch to git-add.

Ah. So a much more intriguing mail subject would be "add: optionally imply
--patch by default"?

> Junio C Hamano then made me aware that when set, this option would
> influence and possibly destroy other commands that internally use
> git-add. So I implemented the recursion counter, which is now the first
> of the two commits. With this, git-add is able to only consider the
> configuration option when run directly by the user, not affecting any
> commands building upon it.

Hmm. But what if `git add` was not run by the user, but rather by a
script? I am wary that the recursion counter may not really be able to
answer the question "Was this `git add` called by the user *directly*?".

> I would be interested whether this is a suited method to restrict the
> effect of a configuration option to cases where a command is explicitly
> invoked by the user.

As I said, I do not think this method can do that reliably.

Traditionally, we recommend aliases in such a case. They are just as
opt-in and also config settings:

	git config [--global] alias.ap 'add -p'

Then, `git ap m*.cpp` would work just like you would expect.

Ciao,
Johannes