Re: git config error message

From: Angelo Borsotti <angelo.borsotti@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 27, 2012, 10:36 UTC
Message-ID: <CAB9Jk9COSZOske5xzgnE=1oHe7qiwwOzHYE6pJkuZ0sZyZYhng@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAP30j15pUwX9sD3FXAfroxFK9paHmb1eAg+M5YAHT4aB22DBEw@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Ben

> This still wouldn't be an error condition though, especially in terms
> of how "git config" should treat it.

The man page says:

   "This command will fail with non-zero status upon error."

Of course, one might claim that this does not mean the truth of the reverse condition, i.e. that when the command returns 1 that is necessarily an error, but I would leave that avenue of thinking to philosophers. Besides that, it is common practice in *nix OSs to consider a return != 0 as an error.

Show 8 quoted lines

> It should be up to the consumer
> of the information to display, or not, any error or diagnostics that
> don't result from either a bad request (your first case) or a
> malformed configuration file.  This fits with the callback nature of
> how the config file is parsed by builtin tools.  The exit code from
> "git config" with a missing key is enough for the consumer to make
> this decision.
>

A well-behaved, user-friendly program, when detects an error tells the user what went wrong. How can otherwise the user tell a corrupted configuration file from a missing key?

Of course, is is possible to provide a git-config that simply returns 0 when it has got the key and 1 when it does not, without issuing any error message, but the current one is not like that, it is a middle way solution.

-Angelo