Re: Feature Request: Support logic or shell execution to control values in .gitconfig

From: Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>
Date: Aug 8, 2013, 15:47 UTC
Message-ID: <rmieha46v6b.fsf@fnord.ir.bbn.com>
In-Reply-To: <vpq1u64dx63.fsf@anie.imag.fr>

Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> What I suggest instead is to edit/track/share template configuration
> files like
>
> ~/.gitconfig.in
> email = me@HOSTNAME@
>
> and then script something like sed -e "s/@HOSTNAME@/$(hostname)/" <
> ~/.gitconfig.in > ~/.gitconfig.
>
> You may also use the include.path functionality to share most of your
> configuration, and include a small file which is different on each host.

For what it's worth, I

  keep dotfiles checked in as m4 sources, which is more or less
  equivalent to Matthieu's suggestion of sed

  don't try to keep .gitconfig under source control, but instead have a
  "git-config" alias that executes a lot of "git config --global"
  commands.

The downsides to the git-config shell function approach are:

  unwanted configurations are not removed

  one has to source (e.g.) .bash_aliases and then rerun git-config after
  updating the dotfile repo,

I suspect what's really needed is some sort of two-way macro preprocessor that can take changes in an output file an back them into the source.