Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] config: Add hashtable for config parsing & retrieval

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 01:34:36AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

You need some mechanism to store entries that are NULL. It may be enough
to silently convert them into the string "true" inside the cached
storage. But there may be callers who treat NULL specially (e.g., a
tri-state true/false/auto that treats a bare boolean as "auto"); you'd
need to check.

The other alternative is to use something besides string_list that can
handle a NULL.  You may also need to give some thought to how such NULLs
would be handled by git_config_get_string() (since a NULL there also
means "not found").

After reading your other patch and thinking about config_error_nonbool,
I don't think it would be right to silently convert this to "true".

E.g., imagine config like:

  [alias]
  foo

If we interpret alias.foo as a boolean, it means "true". But since
alias.* variables are not booleans, the current alias code will produce
an error (with config_error_nonbool). Silently converting it to true in
the config layer would mean the alias code sees only "true", and rather
than generating an error, it would run the command "true".

-Peff