On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 05:18:30PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Little did I know that this would turn not only into a full patch to fix this
issue, but into a full-blown series of nine patches.

It's amazing how often that happens. :)

The first patch is somewhat of a "while at it" bug fix that I first thought
would be a lot more critical than it actually is: It really only affects config
files that start with a section followed immediately (i.e. without a newline)
by a one-letter boolean setting (i.e. without a `= <value>` part). So while it
is a real bug fix, I doubt anybody ever got bitten by it.

That makes me wonder if somebody could craft a malicious config to do
something bad. But I don't think so. Config is trusted already, and it
looks like this bug is both hard to trigger and doesn't result in any
kind of memory funniness, just a bogus output.

Now, to the really important part: why does this patch series not conflict with
my very early statements that we cannot simply remove empty sections because we
may end up with stale comments?

Well, the patch in question takes pains to determine *iff* there are any
comments surrounding, or included in, the section. If any are found: previous
behavior. Under the assumption that the user edited the file, we keep it as
intact as possible (see below for some argument against this). If no comments
are found, and let's face it, this is probably *the* common case, as few people
edit their config files by hand these days (neither should they because it is
too easy to end up with an unparseable one), the now-empty section *is*
removed.

I'm not against people editing their config files by hand. But I think
what you propose here makes a lot of sense, because it works as long as
you don't intermingle hand- and auto-editing in the same section (and it
even works if you do intermingle, as long as you don't use comments,
which are probably even more rare).

So it seems like quite a sensible compromise, and I think should make
most people happy.

-Peff