Re: RFC GSoC idea: new "git config" features

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Sat, Mar 01, 2014 at 12:01:44PM +0100, Matthieu Moy wrote:

quoted

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

If we had the keys in-memory, we could reverse this: config code asks
for keys it cares about, and we can do an optimized lookup (binary
search, hash, etc).

I'm actually dreaming of a system where a configuration variable could
be "declared" in Git's source code, with associated type (list/single
value, boolean/string/path/...), default value and documentation (and
then Documentation/config.txt could become a generated file). One could
imagine a lot of possibilities like

Yes, I think something like that would be very nice. ...
...

quoted

Migrating the whole code to such system would take time, but creating
the system and applying it to a few examples might be feasible as a GSoC
project.

Agreed, as long as we have enough examples to feel confident that the
infrastructure is sufficient.

I agree that it would give us a lot of enhancement opportunities if
we had a central catalog of what the supported configuration
variables are and what semantics (e.g. type, multi-value-ness, etc.)
they have.

One thing we need to be careful about is that we still must support
random configuration items that git-core does not care about at all
but scripts (and future versions of git-core) read off of, though.