Re: [PATCH v3] var: support broken-down idents, default key, multiple args, and -z
Show 11 quoted lines
> Le 3 sept. 2026 à 14:02, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> a écrit :
>
> "Andrew Pleeter via GitGitGadget" <gitgitgadget@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> + if (!vars.nr)
>> usage(var_usage);
>
> I do not know if this is friendly for a tool meant primarily for
> scripts. "git var foo bar" would give information about foo and
> bar, "git var foo" would give informmation about foo, and it is
> natural "git var" alone would give nothing.
I believe « git var » prints usage and exits 129 today, at least on my 2.55.0.340.g8e2bf96aa5.
Lifting the limitation may be sensible, though I suspect the empty case is likely to indicate a logic error earlier in the script; either way, probably out of scope here for now?
Show 23 quoted lines
> This matters because it is plausible to have a list of vars in a
> variable and then run "git var -z $variables | xargs -0 ..." to
> process the vars and their values. If you barf for an empty list,
> then they need to see if they have nothing in $variable, which
> becomes more than "test -z "$variable" because people often take
> advantage of the fact that IFS is ignored to write their accumulator
> like so
>
> variable=" "
> for n in ...
> do
> variable="$variable$n "
> done
>
> case "$variable" in
> *" "word" "*)
> : has the word
> ;;
> esac
>
> which means that $variable may not be an empty string. It is easier
> for scripts if "git var <variable>..." did not barf when the number
> of <variable>s happens to be zero.
Ben Knoble <ben.knoble@gmail.com>