Re: [PATCH 0/5] Audit and document Scalar config

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Dec 1, 2025, 14:04 UTC
Message-ID: <8ec87618-54b0-9b15-c7ff-f53e1f4fe2f7@gmx.de>
In-Reply-To: <pull.2010.git.1764195516.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

Hi Stolee,

On Wed, 26 Nov 2025, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote:

> In September [1], we discussed that the Scalar config options could use some
> documented justification as well as some comments to the config file that
> they were set by Scalar. I was then immediately distracted by other work
> things and am finally here with a series to do just that.

Thank you for doing this, in particular the (quite long!) list of explanations are excellent, especially when some user wonders why a particular setting was chosen and wants to understand the reason.

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> [1]
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/ffa61066-7004-48dd-9096-85b305373bc7@gmail.com/
> 
> I have indeed used Patrick's idea to add '# set by scalar' to each line
> added by Scalar, it took a little more work for all the kinds of config set.

I am glad that the work I put in to optionally add comments pays off.

It's a bit sad that there is no well-designed bulk-edit "API" function which therefore requires constructing and `free()`ing that `file` variable many times, but that's not the fault of this series.

Show 9 quoted lines

> I made myself a co-author.
> 
> While working to justify each config option, I found some stale or incorrect
> config options. I also relaxed the override setting in most cases which gave
> me an opportunity to alphabetize the settings.
> 
> There was at least one case (I'm thinking of core.fscache here) where the
> config doesn't even exist in core Git, but instead in Git for Windows. We'll
> need to adjust in that fork to reinclude it in the right place.

Thank you for calling this out! I will take care of this in Git for Windows and also in Microsoft Git (which inherits this flag from Git for Windows).

To be honest, I am not so certain that we want the FSCache to be enabled, it does have long-standing bugs (introduced by the partial clone feature, for example, where the FSCache continues to retain stale information about which loose objects are present even after the missing ones have been fetched). I guess we'll have to measure the actual performance benefits to reassess whether the feature is worth the trouble.

Thank you for your diligent work, as always, Johannes

Show 23 quoted lines

> 
> Thanks, -Stolee
> 
> Derrick Stolee (5):
>   scalar: annotate config file with "set by scalar"
>   scalar: use index.skipHash=true for performance
>   scalar: remove stale config values
>   scalar: alphabetize and simplify config
>   scalar: document config settings
> 
>  Documentation/scalar.adoc | 158 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  scalar.c                  |  81 ++++++++++---------
>  t/t9210-scalar.sh         |  26 ++++---
>  3 files changed, 218 insertions(+), 47 deletions(-)
> 
> 
> base-commit: 6ab38b7e9cc7adafc304f3204616a4debd49c6e9
> Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-2010%2Fderrickstolee%2Fscalar-config-v1
> Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-2010/derrickstolee/scalar-config-v1
> Pull-Request: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/2010
> -- 
> gitgitgadget
>