Re: [PATCH/RFC] Add global and system-wide gitattributes

Petr Onderka [off-list ref] writes:

Allow gitattributes to be set globally and system wide in ~/.giattributes
and $(prefix)/etc/gitattributes files, respectively. This way, settings
for particular file types can be set in one place and apply for all user's
repositories.

The feature is definitely useful, and I'll use it as soon as it gets
into git.git ;-).

One point: we need to make sure the choice for the the user-wide
filename is the right one, since it's a pain to change it later.

We already have ~/.gitconfig, which often points to ~/.gitexcludes or
~/.gitignored (but this filename is specified with a config variable,
for which we didn't manage to agree on a default value). We're about
to add ~/.gitattributes. That makes 3 ~/.git* files, and I think it's
time to make it a directory (similar to $GIT_DIR/info/)

I think it should be done like this:

1) Default core.excludesfile to $CONF/exclude

2) Make your user-wide gitattribute $CONF/attributes

3) Optionally, read $CONF/config as well as ~/.gitconfig so that
   people can have all their git configuration in the same directory.

Now, we need to agree on $CONF. Some non-options are:

* CONF=~/.gitconfig would clash with the file ~/.gitconfig

* CONF=~/.git would prevent people from versionning their $HOME.

I'd be in favor of following the freedesktop standard (roughly,
defaulting to ~/.config/git):

  http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

because other applications start using it, and it allows one to easily
keep the configuration in a (typically git-versionned) ~/.config
directory. And if we are to choose a config directory, it doesn't harm
to chose one consistant with other applications and with a standard.

I never got time to implement this. If you're willing to do something
like that, that would be great. If not, I'd suggest having a config
variable to point to the user-wide gitattributes file (without a
default value), because it allows a future transition by giving a
default value to the variable.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/