Re: [PATCH 08/15] merge: handle NULL value for branch.<name>.mergeOptions

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:

> To me confusing thing is that we don't treat those two the same way - 
> I'd find it much easier to reason about if empty and missing values were 
> always treated the same and booleans required an explicit value, but it 
> is too late to change that now.

The "valueless true" was there from the beginning, as can be seen in
17712991a5 (Add ".git/config" file parser, 2005-10-10):

    From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:31:08 -0700
    Subject: [PATCH] Add ".git/config" file parser

    This is a first cut at a very simple parser for a git config file.

    The format of the file is a simple ini-file like thing, ...
    diff --git a/config.c b/config.c
    new file mode 100644
    index 0000000000..f3c4fa42ac
    --- /dev/null
    +++ b/config.c
    @@ -0,0 +1,222 @@
    ...
    +int git_config_bool(const char *name, const char *value)
    +{
    +	if (!value)
    +		return 1;
    +	if (!*value)
    +		return 0;
    +	if (!strcasecmp(value, "true"))
    +		return 1;
    +	if (!strcasecmp(value, "false"))
    +		return 0;
    +	return git_config_int(name, value) != 0;
    +}

So I agree that it is way too late to change now.