Re: Implementing branch attributes in git config

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: May 9, 2006, 01:18 UTC
Message-ID: <7v1wv4c7wk.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0605081801360.3718@g5.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> On Mon, 8 May 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> 
>> Wait a minute...  Statefulness is not the issue, I think.
>
> Well, it does end up being..

Not really, you ended up making it so, perhaps, but I do not think it needs to be.

You dodged my comments on the SQL-like queries ;-). I was half (perhaps 3/4) joking, but some people actually might like to be able to say:

	git repo-config --get-all branch.name where url like 'git://%'

to list all the repositories reachable via git-native protocol.

Oops, by the way, why does a [branch] have url as its attribute? I think this was a bad example -- we are talking about [remote] here. But the main point is about syntax, so that is OK.

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> Exactly, git repo-config would have to know about this magic thing, and 
> have a special argument like
>
> 	--state=branch.name
>
> that says that "state" is to be taken from the "branch.name" variable when 
> seen.
>
> Then, in addition to the regexp, you would have a way to trigger on the 
> "state" variable.

I am reluctant to buy that argument (I see it is an easy way from the implementation point of view) -- it appears to me that it would invite this easy user error.

	[branch]
        	name = linus
        	url = git://git.kernel.org/../torvalds/linux-2.6

	[branch]
        	url = git://git.kernel.org/../jgarzik/libata-dev
        	name = libata

> It would be _able_ to do all the same things, but thanks to statefulness 
> you'd be able to keep the section (and key) names the way they are.

Yes, but that statefulness is inviting user errors, and you need to update repo-config and config parser anyway, so I still do not see what the advantage is.