Re: [PATCH] Introduce the GIT_HOME environment variable

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@grenoble-inp.fr>
Date: Dec 21, 2009, 16:26 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqskb49tuq.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <20091221155902.GA22665@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> Are we even close to having this sort of universal support for
> ~/.config?

Definitely not universal as of now. Probably precisely because each application thinks "I'll take care of $XDG_CONFIG_HOME after others do" ;-).

> Traditionally, the standard for Unix
> has been for config files to be $HOME/.something. You can argue that
> ~/.config is a better standard, but I don't think git is failing to
> use a standard; it is simply following a different one.

I've probably been unclear about this. I'm not arguing about moving away from $HOME/.gitconfig as the default (IOW, we're in agreement here ;-) ). It's there, and the migration path would be much more painfull than the benefit.

What I'm saying is that _if_ we introduce a variable to point to an alternate .gitconfig, then we should use something like $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config and not $GIT_HOME/.gitconfig

I don't have a strong opinion on whether we should introduce such variable (it seems the only use-case is the one which started this thread, and it is already solved without it, so ...).

> But we do have such a variable: $HOME. The concept of $GIT_HOME was
> proposed to provide a way to divert _just_ git to a different config
> directory, something that would not be any easier with
> $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

Right, but I don't see any use-case for this.

The use-case which started this thread was to have several physical users using the same Unix account, with the desire that each physical user should be able to use his own editor setups. In this case, you want your editor and your other applications to follow the schema.

Show 9 quoted lines

> Anyway, as far as the future of git goes, even if we did want to switch
> to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, we could not do so suddenly without breaking
> everybody's current setup. Which would mean any implementation of it
> would have to handle both the current and the new proposed locations.
> You can obviously just read from both, but there are a lot of open
> questions, like "which should take precedence?" and "what does git
> config --global --edit do?". I am not opposed to hearing a clever
> proposal that handles all such issues, but I am not going to think too
> hard about it myself. :)

Right, the thing I had in mind was to use $XDG_CONFIG_HOME just like $GIT_HOME (i.e. use it if it's set), but doing so would suddenly break the setup of people having already set $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, and having a $HOME/.gitconfig.

Well, then, I don't know, maybe my proposal wasn't as clever as I thought ;-).

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/