Re: [PATCHv2] git-config: Parse config files leniently

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 4, 2009, 08:40 UTC
Message-ID: <7v8wgvyuf1.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4AA0BE30.1030408@drmicha.warpmail.net>

Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

>> *2* Worse yet, the parsing of branch.autosetuprebase is part of the
>> default_config and commands that do not have anything to do with new
>> branch creation will fail with the current setup.
>
> Thanks for the thorough explanations. Especially *2* makes me think that
> quite some restructuring would be necessary in order to "do it right".

We need to distinguish at least the "syntax" and "semantics" errors, i.e. not necessarily "do it right", but "how your patch should have looked like".

I think a slightly hacky but practical workaround then becomes possible. We can have a config callback function to parse only core.editor (and perhaps some other very minimum set of variables needed to launch the editor on the right config file) extremely loosely, i.e. not even calling git_config_string() to complain about error-nonbool. You can use the callback _only_ from the ACTION_EDIT codepath in builtin-config.c (which currently uses git_default_config and errors out when some uninteresting configuration variables have semantic errors).

That would get rid of the issue that the configuration mechanism triggers semantic errors for unrelated variables, and would give us a usable recovery editor, no?