On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 1:52 AM, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, Mar 05, 2018 at 06:17:26PM -0800, Taylor Blau wrote:

quoted

In an aim to replace:
  $ git config --get-color slot [default] [...]
with:
  $ git config --default default --color slot [...]
introduce `--defualt` to behave as if the given default were present and
assigned to slot in the case that that slot does not exist.

I think this motivation skips over the beginning part of the story,
which is why we want "--color --default". :)

IMHO, the reason we want --default is two-fold:

  1. Callers have to handle parsing defaults themselves, like:

       foo=$(git config core.foo || echo 1234)

     For an integer, that's not too bad, since you can write "1048576"
     instead of "1M". For colors, it's abominable, which is why we added
     "--get-color". But as we add more types that are hard to parse
     (like --expiry-date), it would be nice for them to get the same
     defaulting feature without adding --get-expiry-date, etc.

  2. --get-color is a one-off unlike all of the other types. That's bad
     interface design, but the inconsistency also makes it harder to add
     features which treat the types uniformly (like, say, a --stdin
     query mode).

And perhaps minor, but it's also easier to correctly error-check
--default, since the "foo" example above would do the wrong thing if
git-config encountered a fatal error.

Thanks. For someone (me) who didn't follow the earlier discussion
closely, this motivating explanation really helps; especially since
the commit message mentions only color, which seems to already allow
for a default value, so it wasn't clear what benefit the new --default
provides.

quoted

+test_expect_success 'marshals default value as bool-or-int' '
+     echo "1
+true" >expect &&
+     git config --default 1 --bool-or-int core.foo >actual &&
+     git config --default true --bool-or-int core.foo >>actual &&
+     test_cmp expect actual
+'

Funny indentation. Use:

  {
        echo 1 &&
        echo true
  } >expect &&

or

  cat >expect <<-\EOF
  1
  true
  EOF

Or, simpler:

    test_write_lines 1 true >expect