Re: gitconfig includes

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 01:54:35PM -0500, Eli Barzilay wrote:

> I don't have any strong opinion, but FWIW, the use case I have for this
> is as follows: I sync my ~/.gitconfig between my own machine and a work
> machine.  On the work machine though, I like people to have work emails,
> and I wrote some scripts that verify that.  For my case, I added an
> include of a ~/.gitconfig.more which is not synced, and has values that
> override the ones in ~/.gitconfig.  Since I'm the one who also wrote
> that script, I just added an "--includes" to the check so it won't barf
> on my setup, but had it not been my script I'd be stuck.

I'm not sure what your script does exactly, but in general I think the
right thing for most scripts is _not_ to use a specific-file option like
--global.

If the script is looking up a config value on behalf of a user, it
probably makes sense for it to use the normal config lookup procedure
(system, global, repo, command-line), which also enables includes by
default. That would make it consistent with internal git config lookups
(e.g., user.name probably only ever appears in global config, but you
_can_ override it at the repo level if you want to).

I know that's mostly orthogonal to what we're discussing, but I'd feel
more convinced that enabling "--includes" with "--global" is useful if I
thought that "--global" was useful in the first place outside of a few
narrow debugging cases.

-Peff