Re: [PATCH] config: Rummage through ~/.gitrc as well as the repository's config.
Mark Wooding <mdw@distorted.org.uk> writes:
> Argh. In every terminal and screen window, restart Emacs, ... Logging
> out looks like the better plan.
So you do mean environment variables? Then what's the aversion against using GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL instead of using user.email in every repository? If you use the same value everywhere, you can do the environment thing _today_ and re-logging in needs to be done only once, so I do not find it such a big deal. If you do _not_ use the same value everywhere, then user.email per repository is a good thing to have, but ~/.gitrc would not help.
Having said that, there are good uses for per-user configuration that is used across different repositories. Especially when we start adding new features, we would not want to invent new environment variable every time. Under ~/ would be a logical place to put that information.
If you want to propose a search order of multiple configuration files and how they interact with each other (what happens if ~/.gitrc and $GIT_DIR/config say different things, especially for multi-valued configuration items), go wild. I think the simplest single-value cases should be resolved by taking what $GIT_DIR/config says and if the configuration is not found there then look at ~/.gitrc (IOW, $GIT_DIR/config takes precedence), but I am not sure even if that is true in general. I suspect that some configuration items are more of personal nature and some configuration items are more of per-project attribute. For example, merge resolve strategy would be affected more by the nature of changes that happen to the project's files than which strategy the user feels easier to work with; $GIT_DIR/config may have core.gitproxy and user.email, maybe by historical reasons, which you may rather want to override with ~/.gitrc (e.g. git proxy may require proxy authentication which would need to be supplied per user).
Especially problematic would be user.email. Some people might want to use different identity depending on what project they work on, in which case they would want $GIT_DIR/config to take precedence. But sometimes you may need to go to your colleagues repository and help him with his work, and when you make a commit there you would want your name, not user.email in $GIT_DIR/config that records his identity, to be used for that commit.
