Re: Add configuration options for some commonly used command-line options

[Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 8:43 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
<avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 2:18 PM, brian m. carlson
> <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 11:15:33AM +0100, Matthieu Moy wrote:
>>> I think the main problem is indeed "stop the users from shooting
>>> themselves in the foot". Many command-line options change the behavior
>>> completely so allowing users to enable them by default means allowing
>>> the users to change Git in such a way that scripts calling it are
>>> broken.
>>>
>>> This also doesn't help when troublshouting an issue as these options are
>>> typically something set once and for all and which you forget about.
>>> This typically leads to discussion in Q&A forums like:
>>>
>>> A: Can you run "git foo"?
>>> B: Here's the result: ...
>>> A: I don't understand, I can't reproduce here.
>>>
>>> just because B has a CLI option enabled by default.
>>>
>>> This is the same reasoning that leads Git to forbid aliasing an existing
>>> command to something else.
>>>
>>> OTOH, we already have almost "enable such or such option by default"
>>> with aliases. People who always run "git am" with "-3" can write
>>>
>>> [alias]
>>>         a3 = am -3
>>>
>>> and just run "git a3".
>
> I can't find the E-Mail chain now but this has been discussed on-list
> a while ago. I.e. having some getopt support to say for the push
> command, that the --rebase option can also come from the config, i.e.
> in this case the pull.rebase option.
>
> IIRC the consensus was that such a facility would allow commands or
> individual options to say "this command/option is configurable", thus
> of course all plumbing utilities would be unconfigurable, but
> porcelain scripts would be configurable by default, with some
> exceptions.

This is exactly it! It's much better than adding individual config
variables (less work for sure, but messier). Maybe we should promote
the microproject "Add configuration options for commonly used cmdline
options" to project. If it's too short (I'm guessing the core code
could be done in a month), the gsoc student can always convert more
config to the new way.
-- 
Duy