From: Isabella Caselli <bellacaselli20@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:43:49 GMT
Subject: hostname: includeIf condition — anyone already working on this?
Message-ID: <CAK4AdTRdNEU8cLFQ_7A=CUUL6u6dc327rn_H-SeBBD_dD-K7PA@mail.gmail.com>

Hi all,

I'm looking for a small, relatively simple first contribution to Git
as part of an undergraduate thesis on community/contribution barriers,
and I'd like to work on the "hostname:" includeIf condition requested
in gitgitgadget/git#1665 [1]: matching includeIf on the machine's
hostname, mainly for sharing dotfiles across machines, e.g.:

    [includeIf "hostname:laptop"]
        path = ~/.gitconfig-laptop

I found a related proposal from 2022 for an includeIf condition based
on the operating system [2], which stalled over disagreements about
naming and case sensitivity. My understanding is that "hostname:" is a
narrower, separate condition (machine identity, not platform), so I
don't think it needs to revisit that discussion, but I wanted to check
before starting:

- Is it still relevant for the project?
   - If yes, is anyone already working on this issue?
- Any objection to the approach itself? The same machine can report
its hostname differently depending on how it's set up — sometimes just
the short name, sometimes with the full network address attached to it
— so it isn't obvious whether the condition should compare that value
exactly as the system reports it, or normalize it somehow before
comparing.

If nobody is on it, I'll put together a small patch modeled on the
existing onbranch: condition (dispatch in config.c, tests in
t1305-config-include.sh, docs in config.adoc).

Thanks,
Isabella Caselli
[1] https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/issues/1665
[2] https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/git/patch/pull.1429.v2.git.1669058388327.gitgitgadget@gmail.com/