Re: git config --help not functional on bad config

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 11, 2017, 17:53 UTC
Message-ID: <20170711175342.mllx7efdsqlzv5lo@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.00.1707111541150.18163@ds9.cixit.se>

On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 03:49:21PM +0100, Peter Krefting wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> That's fine. However, when trying to look for help, it is not that useful:
> 
>   $ git config --help
>   error: malformed value for branch.autosetuprebase
>   fatal: bad config variable 'branch.autosetuprebase' in file '.git/config' at line 24
> 
> Perhaps it should allow "--help" to go through even if the configuration is
> bad?

Yes, I agree the current behavior is poor. What's happening under the hood is that "--help" for any command runs "git help config", which in turn looks at the config to pick up things like help.format.

But it also loads git_default_config(), which I suspect isn't actually useful. It goes all the way back to 70087cdbd (git-help: add "help.format" config variable., 2007-12-15), and it looks like it was probably added just to match other config callbacks.

So I think we could probably just do this:

diff --git a/builtin/help.c b/builtin/help.c
index 334a8494a..c42dfc9e9 100644
--- a/builtin/help.c
+++ b/builtin/help.c
@@ -273,7 +273,7 @@ static int git_help_config(const char *var, const char *value, void *cb)
 	if (starts_with(var, "man."))
 		return add_man_viewer_info(var, value);
 
-	return git_default_config(var, value, cb);
+	return 0;
 }
 
 static struct cmdnames main_cmds, other_cmds;

which makes your case work.

-Peff