Re: [PATCH] Generate a warning message if we find an unrecognized option.

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 04:33:35PM -0600, Jeremy White wrote:

quoted

diff --git a/imap-send.c b/imap-send.c
index 51f371b..885da22 100644
--- a/imap-send.c
+++ b/imap-send.c

@@ -1360,6 +1360,7 @@ static int git_imap_config(const char *key, const char *val, void *cb)
 		server.ssl_verify = git_config_bool(key, val);
 	else if (!strcmp("preformattedHTML", key))
 		server.use_html = git_config_bool(key, val);
+        else imap_info("Unknown imap configuration option '%s'\n", key);
 	return 0;
 }

Slight NAK from me on this. When we later add new options, it makes
using the same config for multiple versions of git difficult (the old
versions will complain about the unknown option).

And obviously that is weighed against the ability to notice things like
typos. But if we are going to start complaining about unknown config, we
would probably do better to complain about _all_ unknown config, and not
just this one subsection.

We would probably want something like:

	static int do_warn_unknown_config;

	void warn_unknown_config(const char *key)
        {
		if (do_warn_unknown_config)
                	warn("Unknown configuration variable %s", key);
        }

and sprinkle that everywhere.

An interesting issue is where to flip do_warn_unknown_config.  A naïve
and obvious implementation would do:

        static int git_default_core_config(const char *var, const char *value)
        {
		...
		if (!strcmp(var, "core.warnunknownconfig")) {
			do_warn_unknown_config = git_config_bool(var, value);
			return 0;
		}
		...
	}

but that means the definition of this variable has to come very early in
the configuration file to be effective.