Re: [PATCH v2] config: reject invalid VAR in 'git -c VAR=VAL command'

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 08:17:44PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Hmm. I suspect one cannot do:

  git -c 'section.subsection with an = in it.key=foo' ...

Definitely not a new problem, nor something that should block your
patch. But if we want to fix it, I suspect the problem will ultimately
involve parsing left-to-right to get the key first, then confirming it
has an =, and then the value.

Backtracking will not fundamentally "fix" parsing of

	a.b=c=.d

between twhse two

	[a "b="] c = ".d"
	[a]      b = "c=.d"

unfortunately, I think.  I do not think it is worth doing the "best
effort" with erroring out when ambiguous, because there is no way
for the end user to disambiguate, unless we introduce a different
syntax, at which point we cannot use config_parse_key() anymore.

Ah, yeah, you're right. I thought the problem was just that the "split"
was too naive, but it really is that the whole syntax is badly
specified.

I guess "git config --list" suffers from the same problem. You can get
around it there with "-z", but that probably would not be very pleasant
here. :)

Probably not worth worrying too much about if nobody is complaining.

-Peff