Re: How to undo previously set configuration?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Apr 06, 2018 at 05:55:56PM +0200, Olaf Hering wrote:

> > The general strategy in Git's config is that instead of "unsetting",
> > you
> > should overwrite with whatever value you _do_ want. So a config option
> > like sendemail.smtpauth should accept some kind of empty or "none" value
> > to disable auth.
> > 
> > Most single-value config options should work this way (and if one
> > doesn't, I'd say that's a bug we should fix).
> 
> This does not work. Initially I copied the global config into the repo
> and set all unwanted values to <empty>, like 'smtpuser='. Perhaps the
> config parser recognized that fact, but the consumer does not?

Yes. That logic is handled by the consumer (especially in the case of
send-email, which is a perl script, the code runs in a totally separate
process from the config parser). Naively I'd think that:

  [sendemail]
  smtpAuth =

would do what you want, and then we'd ignore smtpUser completely.
It looks like the smtp_auth_maybe function uses perl's "defined" there,
though. Perhaps it should treat the empty string the same there.

(Or maybe it's something else; I don't use send-email myself, and in a
few trivial examples I couldn't get it to complain about similar
config).

-Peff