Re: git silently ignores include directive with single quotes

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sat, Sep 08, 2018 at 11:58:47AM -0700, Stas Bekman wrote:

> This doesn’t:
> 
> [include]
>         path = '../.gitconfig'

So I think it's been covered elsewhere that single quotes aren't a thing
in git's config format. I will say that this was actually a minor
surprise to me, after a decade of working with the format. ;)

I don't know if it's worth changing now or not It would be
backwards-incompatible, but I wonder if we could do it in a sane way.
E.g., with a rule like:

  - if the first non-whitespace character of the value is a
    single-quote, assume the value is quoted and apply normal shell
    rules (i.e., no backslash escapes until the ending single-quote)

  - otherwise, single-quotes are not special at all

That would allow things like:

  [diff "foo"]
  textconv = some_shell_hackery 'with quotes' | foo

to continue working, but make:

  [some]
  path = 'this has "double quotes" in it!'

do what the user probably intended. It would be a regression for anybody
who literally has a value that starts with a single-quote, but that
seems like it would be pretty rare. Or I dunno, maybe people do it on
Windows to try to protect path-names that get interpreted by the shell.

> The original problem cropped up due to using:
> 
>  git config --local include.path '../.gitconfig'
> 
> which on linux stripped the single quotes, but on some windows git bash
> emulation it kept them.

That sounds like a bug in git bash, if it is not treating single quotes
in the usual shell way. But I'd also expect such a bug to cause loads of
problems in all of the shell scripts. Are you sure it wasn't cmd.exe or
some other interpreter?

-Peff