Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] Introduce config variable "diff.primer"

From: Keith Cascio <keith@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: Feb 9, 2009, 17:24 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.GSO.2.00.0902090921270.719@kiwi.cs.ucla.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20090206161954.GA18956@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Fri, 6 Feb 2009, Jeff King wrote:

> if somebody really wants to call a porcelain and _disable_ options, I don't 
> think "--no-primer" is necessarily the right interface. Instead, the actual 
> command line options given override what's in diff.primer, so you can 
> selectively disable whatever you like.

Sir I appreciate the intention, as I interpret it, that it's always better to accomplish something without adding new vocabulary. I'd much rather avoid adding new vocab if possible. If I'm missing something, I apologize ahead of time, but let me describe the problem I see. Let's take the context size setting as an example, i.e. -U<n> or --unified=<n>. Default is 3. Let's say someone defines diff.primer = -U6. Now, without --no-primer, how does a program say "use the default value for context." Aren't there options for which no inverse counterpart exists? Is there command-line syntax to disable all whitespace ignore options, e.g. to disable -b? If not then we need --no-primer.