Re: [PATCH] docs: clarify that credential discards unrecognised attributes

On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 07:57:48AM +0000, M Hickford via GitGitGadget wrote:

Yeah, this was always part of the intended behavior, but I agree we did not say it very explicitly (aside from an in-code comment!). Both the intent and content of your patch look good to me.

We did discuss patches a long time ago that would let Git carry arbitrary keys between helpers, even if Git itself didn't understand it. One of the intended uses was to let helpers talk to each other about TTLs. So if you had say:

  [credential]
  helper = generate-some-token
  helper = cache

where the first helper generates a token, and the second caches it, the first one could shove a "ttl" or "expiration" key into the protocol, which the cache could then learn to respect.

But we never merged such a thing, and in practice I think people would just implement both parts as a single helper for simplicity. And anyway, even if we did want to do that, such a patch would want to modify the documentation to explain the new behavior. :)

-Peff