Re: [RFC] Git config file reader in Perl (WIP)

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jan 16, 2007, 22:56 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0701162352400.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <200701162337.32759.jnareb@gmail.com>

Hi,

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Jakub Narebski wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> Nikolai Weibull wrote:
> > On 1/16/07, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >> But I agree that XML is serious overkill...
> > 
> > I don't know if it was clear from my first mail, but I wasn't
> > suggesting --xml as a serious alternative.  My point was that if we're
> > going to go through all the fuss of adding all these switches for
> > outputting the configuration file in some fixed format, why not go
> > with one that at least is universal in some sense (not necessarily
> > XML).  And, as Johannes already pointed out, it's very disturbing
> > having to dump a configuration file so that it is more easily read by
> > other programs.  That would suggest that the ini-based format for
> > git's configuration file is suboptimal.
> 
> No, ini-based, or rather ini-like format for git configuration
> is nice,

Exactly.

> but I think git is too forgiving in accepting input. Examples: section 
> header and key/value pair in the same line, allowing multiple quotes in 
> in value part.

But this is nice to the user!

> Well, the idea I had was to have --dump switch to git-repo-config to 
> dump init file as if it was created by git-repo-config invocations, 
> without any hand editing (canonical format).

My point still stands: if you already parse the user-friendly format, why not dump a parse friendly format? If it weren't for those darn non-alnums in the keys, out put of "git repo-config -l" would be perfectly acceptable.

So, how about a "git repo-config --dump" which outputs a stream of NUL separated keys and values? This should be really easy to "parse", and there are no ambiguities: No key or value can contain a NUL.

Ciao, Dscho