Re: RFC proposal: set git defaults options from config

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 03:36:16PM -0700, David Pisoni wrote:

This has some interesting implications.  Consider the case at hand:
git-stash --index is a boolean switch.  It was not the default state,
and it lacked any configuration override, so there was no
'--no-index' switch provided.  If we make this change to git,
presumably EVERY boolean flag like this in all the git subcommands
needs to be backed with a '--no' counterpart.

Most of them already are, by virtue of parse-options. And I don't
think it's a bad thing for those that don't have one to get one.

Thinking this through a little further, there is the potential to
want to override the configured value (in the case of non-booleans)
with an explicit command line switch.  So now we have "precedence
rules" for subcommand options. Probably simple to handle this for
single vars, but harder for multivars.

For single vars, which are most of it, it is pretty simple. For
multivars, mostly "--no-$option" should reset the multivar list
explicitly. I expect there are some oddballs where that is not the case,
though. For example, we just recently found some confusion with
resetting "git status" to its default after seeing "--porcelain".
So there would probably be some cleanup work there.

-Peff