From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 02 Oct 2026 09:00:22 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 2/5] setup: extract path_allowlist_apply()
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD2OFRv1-MXVK3mR+_hMAmXvH1Y=f7j8zhMHo3wkbcK32w@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqy0ckgea3.fsf@gitster.g>

On Tue, Sep 29, 2026 at 7:26 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>
> Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > +     /*
> > +      * A .gitconfig in $HOME may be shared across different
> > +      * machines and the config variable entries may or may not
> > +      * exist as paths on all of these machines.  In other words,
> > +      * it is not a warning worthy event when there is no such path
> > +      * on this machine---the entry may be useful elsewhere.
> > +      */
>
> This might be a minor point (as not many people may be using the
> safe.directory feature that this was moved from), and this dates
> back two years, starting with dc0edbb01c (safe.directory: normalize
> the configured path, 2024-07-30), but the above design decision cuts
> both ways.  If you misspelled a pathname, you would never be told
> about it.
>
> I wonder if we want to allow users to explicitly mark that it is OK if
> a path does not exist, in much the same way that a pathname-typed
> configuration variable can be prefixed with :(optional) to tell the
> system "if this path exists on the system, use it, but if not, instead
> of warning, pretend that you did not see this specified".
>
> That way, a user can first specify the value normally, and then when
> they reuse the .gitconfig file somewhere else that does not have the
> path, they see a warning message.  You would help them by giving a
> hint, e.g.,
>
>     Specified path foo/bar does not exist.  If you spelled the
>     pathname correctly, and the path is allowed to be missing,
>     mark it as optional, i.e., ":(optional)foo/bar".
>
> or something along those lines in the warning message and the world
> would be a much better place.
>
> In any case, it is outside the scope of this series, beyond leaving
> a NEEDSWORK comment here, and/or a #leftoverbits comment in the
> review.

There is the following new NEEDSWORK comment in the v5 I just sent:

+        * NEEDSWORK: this also silently ignores misspelled paths. We
+        * may want to warn about a missing path unless it is marked
+        * as allowed to be missing, e.g., with an ":(optional)"
+        * prefix like pathname-typed configuration values, and hint
+        * about that prefix in the warning.

Thanks.