From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2021 04:29:43 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] for-each-repo: do nothing on empty config
Message-ID: <CAPig+cQ5_J4MU9CkG9kyjOTrYPFikkX4vG6AFQhczUT857H7pg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqturtrdre.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

On Wed, Jan 6, 2021 at 3:50 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> writes:
> > Is the API of this command ideal? It feels odd to force the user to
> > specify required input via a command-line option rather than just as a
> > positional argument. In other words, since the config variable name is
> > mandatory, an alternative invocation format would be:
> >
> >     git for-each-repo <config-var> <cmd>
>
> Or not to use any configuration variable (or not to have the
> for-each-repo subcommand at all) and let the users write
> something along the lines of...
>
>         git config --get-all <config-var> |
>         while read repo
>         do
>                 ( cd "$repo" && <cmd> )
>         done
>
> which is not all that bad and much more flexible.

I had the same thought/question about why git-for-each-repo exists,
though I didn't verbalize it since I assumed the reason was covered
during the original discussion or patch submission, which I did not
follow. I can see this command possibly being useful for Windows users
who don't necessarily have a Unix-like shell or MS PowerShell with
which to open-code the loop you illustrated. This may be especially
important when this is used for some sort of scheduled maintenance on
Windows, as a guess.