Re: [PATCH] bugreport: add tool to generate debugging info

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com> writes:

> I think a whitelist of config options to print would grow stale
> immediately, and the options we're missing would be very likely to be
> configs to turn on new experimental features - which is probably what we
> most want the bugreport for.

The implementation of your "git bugreport" command comes from the
same version of Git as such an experimental feature you want
feedback to is shipped with, so I am not sure where your concern
about staleness comes from.

If you really care about getting quality reports, you need to earn
users' trust (one way of doing so would be to maintain a good "list
of benign configuration knobs whose values help diagnosing issues"),
and you need to make sure we obtain relevant pieces of information.
Both of these things are something you need to actively work on.

We have trained ourselves to the point that we consider it a bug if
you add a new command git-bugreport without adding a corresponding
pattern in the .gitignore file.  And thanks to that discipline, we
have been fairly good at keeping .gitignore up to date.  I do not
see a reason why we cannot do something similar to the registry of
configuration variables that we care about, which may be shipped as
part of "git bugreport" command.