Re: [PATCH v2 5/5] scalar: document config settings

From: Henrique Ferreiro <hferreiro@igalia.com>
Date: Dec 11, 2025, 14:20 UTC
Message-ID: <e19246a7-40db-41d0-9cdf-817833123f45@igalia.com>
In-Reply-To: <ac1627dbd94e3330117fbaeac2e2373104aef531.1764607847.git.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

On 12/1/25 5:50 PM, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote:

> From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
> 
> Add user-facing documentation that justifies the values being set by
> 'scalar clone', 'scalar register', and 'scalar reconfigure'.

Hi Derrick. I was planning to contribute a patch removing some config options so I'll take this opportunity to just discuss those here.

My motivation is that some of the options seem to be related to things other than performance and the list is huge, so I believe that some options don't belong to scalar.

> +REQUIRED AND RECOMMENDED CONFIG
> +-------------------------------

There's no mention on which configs are required and which are recommended, and it looks like none are actually required so maybe just remove REQUIRED.

> +am.keepCR=true::

 > +core.logAllRefUpdates=true::
 > +credential.https://dev.azure.com.useHttpPath=true::
 > +http.sslBackend=schannel::

These options are not related to performance. Why not keeping them out of scalar?

> +core.autoCRLF=false::
> +core.safeCRLF=false::

 > +index.threads=true::

These options just duplicate the default settings.

> +feature.manyFiles=false::
> +	This disables the "many files" optimizations grouped under this feature
> +	config. The expectation is that all valuable optimizations are also set
> +	explicitly by Scalar config, and any differences are intentional.

I disagree with this reasoning. This thread was actually brought to my attention when working on setting manyFiles to true in scalar: https://github.com/git/git/pull/2125.

Do you foresee any features that would apply to scalar but not to manyFiles? I'd even say that some scalar options could be moved to manyFiles instead, so that people that don't use scalar can benefit too.

Cheers, Henrique.