Re: [PATCHv2] git-config: Parse config files leniently

Michael J Gruber [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

*2* Worse yet, the parsing of branch.autosetuprebase is part of the
default_config and commands that do not have anything to do with new
branch creation will fail with the current setup.

Thanks for the thorough explanations. Especially *2* makes me think that
quite some restructuring would be necessary in order to "do it right".

We need to distinguish at least the "syntax" and "semantics" errors, i.e.
not necessarily "do it right", but "how your patch should have looked
like".

I think a slightly hacky but practical workaround then becomes possible.
We can have a config callback function to parse only core.editor (and
perhaps some other very minimum set of variables needed to launch the
editor on the right config file) extremely loosely, i.e. not even calling
git_config_string() to complain about error-nonbool.  You can use the
callback _only_ from the ACTION_EDIT codepath in builtin-config.c (which
currently uses git_default_config and errors out when some uninteresting
configuration variables have semantic errors).

That would get rid of the issue that the configuration mechanism triggers
semantic errors for unrelated variables, and would give us a usable
recovery editor, no?