Re: Confusion with git config list --show-origin

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Oct 2, 2026, 21:01 UTC
Message-ID: <asAbjl-3IIbGKGkA@fruit.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <ar3_jVZPdgKSZJF2@pks.im>

On 2026-10-01 at 06:37:01, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

Show 30 quoted lines

> On Tue, Sep 29, 2026 at 02:36:20PM +0200, Christophe Lohr wrote:
> > Hello,
> >   The 'git config list --show-origin' command is very useful for
> > understanding where the settings come from.
> > This command lists the files involved, specifying the full path for each
> > one,
> > except for '.git/config'
> > 
> > This gives the impression that there is a '.git/' directory in the current
> > working directory, even though it isn't located here but higher up in the
> > directory tree.
> > So, may I suggest, that this command display the full path to the
> > .git/config file used by the current git command?
> 
> I agree that this is quite confusing. I'm a bit torn on whether the
> consequence of that is that the resulting path should be an absolute
> one. But at the very least, in the case where we're not in the root of
> the Git repository there is a good case to be made that we should adapt
> the relative path to be relative to the current working directory and
> not to the top-level directory of the repository.
> 
> One thing I wonder about though is whether that would break any users
> out there. I think it's unlikely that any scripts out there parse the
> output. But if they do, they may have long since learned that the
> repository-local file is always specified relative to the top-level
> directory of the repository. And if we were to change that now, then
> those scripts may break.
> 
> As I said, I think the risk of breakage is comparatively low. But I'd be
> curious to learn what others think about this.

I think it would be fine to specify it as an absolute path, provided it's canonicalized (symlink-free). We already do that for other paths in the output, so callers already have to deal with that case.

There is certainly the possibility of breakage, but I agree it's likely low. It's also not hard to do something like `git rev-parse --path-format=absolute --git-path config` to find out which file is the local file among multiple.

-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA