Re: [PATCH] gitweb: Use GITWEB_CONFIG_SYSTEM even if GITWEB_CONFIG does exist

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: May 14, 2011, 21:06 UTC
Message-ID: <20110514210603.GA11502@elie>
In-Reply-To: <201105142137.16541.jnareb@gmail.com>

Jakub Narebski wrote:

> If per-instance configuration file exists, then system-wide
> configuration was _not used at all_.  This is quite untypical and
> suprising behavior.

I agree. How to avoid breaking existing installations, though? (I'm especially worried because distro packages tend to ship their own /etc/gitweb.conf, so the admin might not even know about what's there.) For example, depending on the content of /etc/gitweb.conf, this has the potential to break "git instaweb".

It could be simpler to document that users should put

	do $GITWEB_CONFIG_SYSTEM;

at the start of gitweb_config.conf to reuse options from the system configuration file and override them. But that's not very satisfying, since I don't see a nice way to move to a better behavior after that without breaking some existing installations. (It would be possible to check for a new ./gitweb-config-in-addition-to-what-was-in-etc.conf file but that doesn't seem so nice.)

If this were a command-line tool, I would be happy as long as there is some way to prevent reading /etc/gitweb.conf through the environment. For a webapp I don't know how easy it is to set environment variables typically. So thoughts from people in that corner of the world would be interesting.