Re: how exactly can git config section names contain periods?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 4, 2018, 12:09 UTC
Message-ID: <20180604120917.GA22371@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.21.1806030634200.8966@localhost.localdomain>

On Sun, Jun 03, 2018 at 06:35:44AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> > >   if (for some weird reason) i wanted to define a multi-level
> > > subsection,
> >
> > You can't, there are no multi-level subsections, see above.
> 
>   no, i *get* that, what i was asking was if i wanted to simulate or
> emulate such a thing ... or is that just getting too weird and there
> is no compelling reason to want to go down that road? (which i am
> totally prepared to accept.)

You can do whatever you like with the subsection; its contents are generally dependent on the semantics of the key. E.g., remote.<remotename>.*, branch.<branchname>.*. That's why Git tries to be permissive with the syntax.

So you are free to consider "foo.a.b.c.key" as some kind of multi-level hierarchy if that's useful to you. But you won't get any tool support from Git, and I don't think there is any compelling reason to use "." versus some other syntax (except that it perhaps looks better to the user).

-Peff