Re: General support for ! in git-config values

On 2 February 2012 10:54, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Feb 02, 2012 at 10:44:05AM +0100, demerphq wrote:

quoted

The general design of git seems to me to be based around providing
building blocks that people can use to build new and interesting tools
on top of, and so it seems counter to that philosophy to reject an
feature based on speculative security issues that really can't be
decided in advance but must instead be decided on a case by case
basis.

I can't speak for Junio, but I am certainly not rejecting it. Only
saying that it needs to be thought through, and the utility weighed
against the costs.

Of course. I totally understand. I have written mails saying stuff
like this myself. :-)

So far I haven't seen an actual patch to comment on
(or even a proposed syntax beyond starting a string with "!", which I
think is a non-starter due to conflicting with existing uses),

I understand. I think we will probably use backtick quoting in git-deploy. So

deploy.prefix=`cat /etc/SERVER_ROLE`

will execute cat /etc/SERVER_ROLE and use the results as the value of
the config option.

nor have
I seen a concrete use case (you mentioned pulling the name/email from
ldap, but you also mentioned that there are lots of other ways of
solving that particular problem, so it's not especially compelling).

One place that it would be useful for us in git-deploy would be to
detect the tag prefix for the rollout we are doing. Every staging
server already has a file that contains this value. We would like to
make it easy for people to configure the tool to either use the value
provided, or to use something like  `cat /etc/SERVER_ROLE` instead.
Anyway, from that POV I could totally understand "so do that in
git-deploy". Since the tool is written in perl we have to wrap
git-config anyway, so it easy to add a special case for ourselves.

But I still think the general idea is pretty useful, the ldap example
is IMO a cleaner solution than the alternatives, and a variant that I
think is much harder to do currently come to mind right away: setting
the user.email automatically depending on where in your tree a git
repo was located, so that when I work on repo underneath  /CPAN/ it
uses my CPAN address, and when I work in my /work/ tree it uses my
$work address, etc, without me having to configure it repo by repo.
(This has bitten more than once in the past)

I'd be happy to hear a more concrete proposal.

I will be mostly afk the next week so I will leave that to Avar if he
wants to pursue it.

cheers,
Yves


-- 
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"