The git spring cleanup challenge

Hello,

The premise is simple: git.git developers are experts in git, and therefore they have fine-tuned their ~/.gitconfig to a point that is pretty far from what any newcomer will experience for a long time.

How long can you survive with a pristine configuration?

Plenty of developers take many things in their configuration for granted, they forget what the default behavior is, or worse: they forget they actually have configured log.decorate, and are surprised when they discover the reason they could not reproduce a bug report.

Now and then I cleanup my configuration to be reminded of that fact.

Anybody remembers merge.defaultToUpstream, and what `git merge` without arguments used to do? [1] What about sendemail.chainReplyTo? [2]

It's important that we force ourselves to experience what an unconfigured git setup looks like, even if it's just for a little bit.

So the challenge is this:

  1. Remove all the configuration that is not essential (just leave
     user.name and user.email or equivalent)
  2. Pick 2 configurations you think you can't live without. You are not
     allowed to change them afterwards.
  3. Every day you can add 1 additional configuration (and update it the
     next day).
  4. The moment you add a 4th configuration you lose.

Once you've lost, reply to this message with the configuration you could not live without.

These are the configurations I've chosen:

  [merge]
    conflictstyle = diff3
  [sendemail]
    smtpserver = /usr/bin/msmtp

If if not clear yet, I hope by the end of this little experiment we will have at least one configuration that surely everyone can agree needs to become a default.

Do you think you can survive one month?

Good luck!

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/1296231457-18780-1-git-send-email-felipe.contreras@gmail.com/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/git/1369453492-20972-1-git-send-email-felipe.contreras@gmail.com/