Re: [PATCH 0/3] Convert grep to recurse in-process

Hi,

Jeff King wrote:

I didn't follow the rest of the "struct repository" series closely, but
I don't feel like we ever reached a resolution on how config would be
handled. I notice that the in-process "ls-files" behaves differently
than the old one when config differs between the submodule and the
parent repository. As we convert more commands (that use more config)
this will become more likely to be noticed by somebody.

Do we have a plan for dealing with this? Is our solution just "recursed
operations always respect the parent config, deal with it"?

For settings like branch.<name>.remote, I don't think anyone would
disagree that the right thing to do is to use the per-repository
config of the submodule.  The repository object is already able to
handle per-repository config, so this just involves callers being
careful not to cache values locally in a way that conflates
repositories.  It should be pretty straightforward (for commands like
"git fetch --recurse-submodules", for example).

For settings like grep.patternType, on the other hand, it would be
very strange for the behavior to change when grep crosses the
submodule boundary.  So I think using the parent project config is the
right thing to do and the old behavior was simply wrong.  In other
words, I don't think this is so much a case of "deal with it" as
"sorry we got the behavior so wrong before --- we've finally fixed it
now".

But this is subtle.  Maybe some notes in the config documentation for
relevant settings would help.  That would make the intended behavior
clearer and make debugging easier for users.

Thanks,
Jonathan