Re: [PATCH 1/2] Add possibility to store configuration in ~/.config/git/config file

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@grenoble-inp.fr>
Date: May 26, 2012, 09:05 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqtxz3mhx8.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <7vd35sq7fx.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> If you read from .gitconfig and also from the new location, but update
> only the new location,

That's not exactly the proposal. First, I agree that the first questions to be answered is what happens on reading. About writing, I don't feel very strongly about it, but I think it's reasonable to write to the new location if the old location doesn't exist, and the new one does. This way, ~/.gitconfig haters will create their ~/.config/git/config, and won't be bothered with the former.

Obviously, trying too hard to write to the new location would harm old versions users, so for example, it would be unreasonable to write to the new location unconditionally.

> people who use two versions of git will be in a very confusing
> situation. Randomly, some of their updates are always in effect,

Only if they created manually the new file. People unaware of the change won't be affected at all.

Since most people don't read the docs, most people will be unaffected ;-).

>  - If ~/.gitconfig exists, do not do anything new.  Just exercise the
>    original code.  For these users, ~/.config/ does _not_ exist as far as
>    Git is concerned.

As Jeff already pointed out, this would be very confusing for a user having the new file, since running once "git config --global" with an old version would shadow the whole configuration by creating an almost empty ~/.gitconfig file.

We clearly want to read both. I'm not sure which should take precedence when the same variable is defined in both.

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