Re: General support for ! in git-config values

From: demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 2, 2012, 10:21 UTC
Message-ID: <CANgJU+XoZd6x6jdSHszigZaPgi+6H3Nbf4OG7p0y1_=7m+qntA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20120202095432.GA19356@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On 2 February 2012 10:54, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Thu, Feb 02, 2012 at 10:44:05AM +0100, demerphq wrote:
>
>> The general design of git seems to me to be based around providing
>> building blocks that people can use to build new and interesting tools
>> on top of, and so it seems counter to that philosophy to reject an
>> feature based on speculative security issues that really can't be
>> decided in advance but must instead be decided on a case by case
>> basis.
>
> I can't speak for Junio, but I am certainly not rejecting it. Only
> saying that it needs to be thought through, and the utility weighed
> against the costs.

Of course. I totally understand. I have written mails saying stuff like this myself. :-)

> So far I haven't seen an actual patch to comment on
> (or even a proposed syntax beyond starting a string with "!", which I
> think is a non-starter due to conflicting with existing uses),

I understand. I think we will probably use backtick quoting in git-deploy. So

deploy.prefix=`cat /etc/SERVER_ROLE`

will execute cat /etc/SERVER_ROLE and use the results as the value of the config option.

> nor have
> I seen a concrete use case (you mentioned pulling the name/email from
> ldap, but you also mentioned that there are lots of other ways of
> solving that particular problem, so it's not especially compelling).

One place that it would be useful for us in git-deploy would be to detect the tag prefix for the rollout we are doing. Every staging server already has a file that contains this value. We would like to make it easy for people to configure the tool to either use the value provided, or to use something like `cat /etc/SERVER_ROLE` instead. Anyway, from that POV I could totally understand "so do that in git-deploy". Since the tool is written in perl we have to wrap git-config anyway, so it easy to add a special case for ourselves.

But I still think the general idea is pretty useful, the ldap example is IMO a cleaner solution than the alternatives, and a variant that I think is much harder to do currently come to mind right away: setting the user.email automatically depending on where in your tree a git repo was located, so that when I work on repo underneath /CPAN/ it uses my CPAN address, and when I work in my /work/ tree it uses my $work address, etc, without me having to configure it repo by repo. (This has bitten more than once in the past)

> I'd be happy to hear a more concrete proposal.

I will be mostly afk the next week so I will leave that to Avar if he wants to pursue it.

cheers, Yves

-- 
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"