From: brian m. carlson Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2026 17:26:52 GMT Subject: Re: sharp edges in Git configuration files Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On 2026-10-31 at 02:56:44, Chris Torek wrote: > The obvious thing with "doctor it hurts when I do this" is of course > "well don't do that", and nobody should be splitting their .git/config > into multiple included sub-config-files. But, in the spirit of robust > software (and perhaps just as leftover bits?), it might be wise to > make Git ignore include lines in config files that are intended to be > Git-managed directly, such as .git/config. I actually believe we're using includes for `.git/config` in some cases at work and I'm pretty sure my colleagues do want them to continue to work. I don't know exactly why they're doing that, since I'm not intimately involved with that project, but I will point out that our fork of Git has a checksum that includes the `config` file (but not included files) and that must be in sync across replicas, so they may be doing so to test out a config setting on a particular host during development. In any event, I'd say that while it may seem bizarre, some people might want to do this for other reasons[0], so we probably shouldn't break it. [0] One reason I can imagine is personal configuration (via `path=~/...`) in large shared repositories. Yes, people shouldn't be doing that, but we know they do. -- brian m. carlson (they/them) Toronto, Ontario, CA Speaking for myself only