Re: [PATCH v3 0/3] config: add '--sources' option to print the source of a config value

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 13, 2016, 18:19 UTC
Message-ID: <20160213181901.GC9516@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CANoM8SWj08qKvDXhyfRXLV2iuYJ7Vjdutzjt0Q2ZNOcProqy=Q@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 09:43:34AM -0500, Mike Rappazzo wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> > I renamed the flag from "--source" to "--show-origin" as I got the impression
> > that Sebastian, Peff and Ramsay seem to be all OK with "--show-origin".
> 
> I know that I am late to the party here, but why not make the option
> `--verbose` or `-v`?  `git config` doesn't have that now, and this
> seems like a logical thing to include as verbose data.  I would
> venture to guess that `--verbose` is more likely to be the first thing
> that someone who is looking for this information will guess at before
> they run `git config --help`.

I'm actually opposed to "--verbose" because it is too vague. That is fine for a human, but this is also an interface that we expect scripts to parse, and which we therefore cannot later change without breaking them. I am not prepared to set "--verbose" in stone as showing the source file and nothing else, for all time.

We _could_ have "--show-origin", and then "--verbose" implies "--show-origin", and we don't promise that it might not show more later. But I don't think that is worth the added complexity (not in code, but just in what we have to explain to the user).

-Peff