Re: [PATCH] Introduce the GIT_HOME environment variable
- From
Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@grenoble-inp.fr>
- Date
- Dec 21, 2009, 10:25 UTC
- Message-ID
- <vpqhbrkd3o6.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
- In-Reply-To
- <7vskb6bwvu.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
Show 12 quoted lines
> Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:
>
>> http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html
>>
>> It solves the same problem ("set on environment variable, and change
>> my whole Git config"), but
>>
>> * It's a standard. It's really nice to be able to ...
>> * It avoids hidden files. With $GIT_CONFIG, a user doing
>
> I think the above are actually three bullet points (i.e. you lack line
> break and bullet before "It's really nice").No, I don't.
You can do
| cd ~/.config | ls | | to see a user's configuration for many applications at a time,
_because_ it's a standard, and because it's followed by several applications.
> And the third bullet is more or less a small subset of the second > one, since you need "ls -a" without making them non-dot,
The standard may not write black-on-white $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/subdir/filename _with filename being non-hidden_, but in practice, this is what's happening.
> And I personally don't care very much about that second "It's really > nice to be able to" point.
You may not care about consistancy between applications, but I do. Currently, to version-control my user's configuration, I have $HOME/etc containing my user's config files, and the actual config files are symlinks to it. If applications were agreeing on a directory where configuration files would be stored (is it is the case on systems like MS Windows, and I think Mac OS), I would just had done "cd this-config-directory; git init".
With the proposed $GIT_HOME, I have a way to specify _Git_'s path to config files. Another application may propose $WHATEVER_ELSE_HOME, and yet another would say $HOME_YET_ANOTHER_ONE, and so on. There's a proposal to have a single environment variable for all this, why reject it?
Show 8 quoted lines
> As to the particular "standard" cited, I don't know how relevant it is to > us at this moment, or in this topic. Judging from the fact that it > doesn't even define the scope of the standard (e.g. what classes of > applications are expected to follow it, for what benefit do they follow > it, how are they expected to handle differences between their historical > practice and the new world order it introduces, etc. etc....), I suspect > it is a very early draft that will be heavily copyedited before final, > once professional standard writers start looking at it.
I mostly agree on the critics, but do you have any better "standard" (actually, not necessarily an official standard, but "something that various applications can agree on") to propose?
-- Matthieu Moy http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/