Re: git-checkout doesn't seem to respect config from include.path

From: Greg Hurrell <greg@hurrell.net>
Date: Feb 3, 2022, 17:39 UTC
Message-ID: <3f1972f3-c764-41e9-9853-8f1c303d4f6b@beta.fastmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <0b8222c2-7337-7e8f-33d1-7926462daac1@gmail.com>

On Thu, Feb 3, 2022, at 4:54 PM, Phillip Wood wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> Hi Greg
> 
> On 02/02/2022 16:04, Greg Hurrell wrote:
> 
> > `git config --get merge.conflictStyle` correctly reports that my setting is
> > "diff3" on such machines, and `git config --get-all merge.conflictStyle`
> > shows:
> > 
> >      diff3
> >      zdiff3
> > 
> > In other words, it knows that I have multiple values set, but it uses
> > a last-one-wins policy.
> > 
> > However, when I try to run a command like `git checkout -b something`,
> > Git dies with:
> > 
> >      fatal: unknown style 'zdiff3' given for 'merge.conflictstyle'
> 
> I think what is happening is that git parses each line of the config 
> file as it reads it so the old version of git sees "zdiff3" and errors 
> out before it reads the include line.

That gave me the idea of moving the `include.path` setting higher up in the file, to see if `git checkout` would consult that value first, but it doesn't work; `git config merge.conflictStyle` shows the value from the file indicated in `include.path`, but a command like `git checkout` still dies based on the value in ~/.gitconfig.

Overall this points to the general problem that it is not only hard to make a single config that works on different machines, but it's hard to make a _combination_ of files that works on different machines.

For now, I think my workaround is going to be templating out machine-specific files.

Greg