Re: [PATCH] credential doc: make multiple-helper behavior more prominent (Re: [PATCH] clone: handle empty config values in -c)

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: May 2, 2017, 00:30 UTC
Message-ID: <20170502003010.GW28740@aiede.svl.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20170502002114.GV28740@aiede.svl.corp.google.com>

Starting out the reviews:

Jonathan Nieder wrote:

[...]

> configuration item to empty before giving it a new value.  This is
> already documented by the documentation is hard to find ---

                     ^^
s/by/but/

Sorry for the confusion.

[...]

> +++ b/Documentation/gitcredentials.txt

[...]

Show 13 quoted lines

> @@ -162,6 +152,16 @@ helper::
>  	shell (so, for example, setting this to `foo --option=bar` will execute
>  	`git credential-foo --option=bar` via the shell. See the manual of
>  	specific helpers for examples of their use.
> ++
> +If there are multiple instances of the `credential.helper` configuration
> +variable, each helper will be tried in turn, and may provide a username,
> +password, or nothing. Once Git has acquired both a username and a
> +password, no more helpers will be tried.
> ++
> +If `credential.helper` is configured to the empty string, this resets
> +the helper list to empty (so you may override a helper set by a
> +lower-priority config file by configuring the empty-string helper,

It's not necessarily obvious to a new user what "lower-priority" means.

Since this text is an example, maybe it should say something like "so, for example, you can override a helper set in /etc/gitconfig by configuring the empty-string helper followed by whatever set of helpers you would like in ~/.gitconfig".

That's orthogonal to this patch but it should be straightforward to roll in if it makes sense.

Thanks, Jonathan