Re: [PATCH] user-manual: set user.name and user.email with repo-config

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jan 28, 2007, 00:32 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0701271625120.25027@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070128002246.GA10179@moooo.ath.cx>

On Sun, 28 Jan 2007, Matthias Lederhofer wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> There are some other places where direct editing of .git/config is
> suggested.  I'd rather tell the user to use repo-config and add a note
> that repo-config saves the configuration to .git/config (or
> ~/.gitconfig with --global) which can be edited by hand too.
> cat .git/config to show the remote configuration can be replaced by
> git-repo-config -l | grep '^remote\.'

I dunno. I really think that editing the config file is actually simpler.

The "git repo-config" thing is really usefull from scripting, and for general automation, but maybe it's just me - I find human-readable ASCII files that you can put comments in etc just *nice*.

I think the whole notion that you have to use a tool to edit configurations is asinine. It's good to have a tool for automation, but it's bad if that's the only way to interact with the system.

The first time I had to use AIX, and realized that they do everything with some crazy system management tool, and that you can't do anything by editing files in /etc, I realized that IBM was totally incompetent when it came to UNIX.

I mean, do people _really_ think that it's easier to do black magic scripts like

	git repo-config --global user.name "Your Name Comes Here"

(which not only looks scary, but means that the user will never learn about the git config file at all), or just somebody saying:

	"Fill your .git/config file with

		[user]
			name = Your Name Here
			email = your@email.example

	 and be happy"

I'm just saying that the second example seems to not only be more human-friendly, it actually teaches people something that "git repo-config" never did.

Maybe most users will just do what they are told without thinking about it, but then some users will look at that and say "Ahh, there's a .git/config file, I wonder what else I could do there.."

			Linus