Re: [PATCH 0/6] Some more git config completions

From: SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 4, 2017, 18:41 UTC
Message-ID: <20170604184110.26804-1-szeder.dev@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACBZZX6aGkBaQtjKNx09-XEbhXNubOnhJdVXYkNq419wetDvqg@mail.gmail.com>

> As an aside from this series, has anyone ever proposed some method of
> semi-automatically keeping this up-to-date?

For configuration variables, not that I know of. For command line options, there was an attempt to enhance parse-options to dump all command line options and use this in the completion script on-demand to lazy-initialize command-specific variables holding the list of options:

  http://public-inbox.org/git/1334140165-24958-1-git-send-email-bebarino@gmail.com/T/#u

> Seems we're in a continual
> cycle of adding flags/config, forgetting to update this, then updating
> it. At least the command-line flags should be easy to parse out in
> some test, ditto config variables from config.txt maybe...

A couple of thoughts concerning configuration variables:

 - config.txt includes other files listing configuration variables,
   too.
 - There are many config variables with subsections, e.g.
   'branch.<name>.description'.  That '<name>' is not good for
   completion, of course.
 - Some config variables are not listed with their full names, see
   'advice.*' (this is easy to fix).
 - Perhaps there are config variables that are only mentioned in the
   docs of the relevant command, but not in config.txt (or in the
   included files).
 - There are definitely config variables that are not mentioned in the
   docs at all, e.g. the 'bash.*' variables controlling __git_ps1().
 - The completion script is currently self-contained and ready to be
   used as-is.  I think that's quite nice.  This wouldn't be the case
   if we want to include an automatically generated list of config
   variables extracted from config.txt during the build process.