Re: git silently ignores include directive with single quotes

From: Stas Bekman <stas@stason.org>
Date: Sep 9, 2018, 02:57 UTC
Message-ID: <066f8a3e-062f-b921-c15d-ce4dd7adf377@stason.org>
In-Reply-To: <d9330ba54fbda54a92a9f4d9320836d88ce9a6e6.camel@mad-scientist.net>

On 2018-09-08 07:51 PM, Paul Smith wrote: [...]

Show 13 quoted lines

> What I personally think would be more useful would be some sort of
> "verbose parsing" option to git config, that would parse the
> configuration just as a normal Git command would and show diagnostic
> output as the entire config is parsed: for each action line the config
> file name and line number, and the operation performed (and any message
> about it) would be printed.  This could be useful in a variety of
> situations, for instance to discover conflicts between local, global,
> and system configuration, easily see where settings are coming from,
> etc.
> 
> And as part of this output, when an include file was not present or we
> didn't have permissions or whatever, an appropriate error message would
> be generated.

I was thinking along the same lines, Paul - i.e. no need to change anything in the config syntax, but to provide better diagnostics.

I quote below what I suggested in an earlier email, but I like Paul's idea even better as it'd be useful to many situations and not just the one that started this thread.

Show 38 quoted lines

> 1) I suggest this is done via:
>
>   git config --list --show-origin
>
> where the new addition would be to also show configuration parts that
> are not active and indicating why it is so.
>
> So for example currently I get on a valid configuration setup and having
> git/../.gitconfig in place the following output:
>
> [...]
> file:/home/stas/.gitconfig      mergetool.prompt=false
> [...]
> file:.git/config        include.path=../.gitconfig
> [...]
> file:.git/../.gitconfig
> filter.fastai-nbstripout-code.clean=tools/fastai-nbstripout
> [...]
>
> Now, if include.path=../.gitconfig is there and file:.git/../.gitconfig
> is not found, it will indicate that in some way that stands out for the
> user. Perhaps:
>
> [...]
> file:/home/stas/.gitconfig      mergetool.prompt=false
> [...]
> file:.git/config        include.path=../.gitconfig
> [...]
> file:.git/../.gitconfig FILE NOT FOUND! Ignored configuration
> [...]
>
> So that would allow things to work as before, but now we have a way to
> debug user-side configuration. And of course hoping that the docs would
> indicate that method for debugging configuration problems.
>
> I hope this is a reasonable suggestion that doesn't require any
> modification on the users' part who rely on this silent ignoring
> "feature", yet lending to a configuration debug feature.

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