Thread (1 message) 1 message, 1 author, 2018-05-23

Re: should config options be treated as case-sensitive?

From: Junio C Hamano <hidden>
Date: 2018-05-23 23:34:00

"Robert P. J. Day" [off-list ref] writes:
quoted
Unfortunately, that line of thinking leads us to madness, as you are
exhibiting the typical symptom of "my today's immediate itch is the
most important one in the world"-itis....
  fair enough, point taken.
FWIW, everybody suffers from it, including me.

I was trying to come up with an update, and here is an attempted
rewrite of the earlier section.  I am not sure if this is a good
direction to go in, but if so, we'd need to reduce the duplicated
info from the Syntax section that immediately follows.

 Documentation/config.txt | 22 +++++++++++++++-------
 1 file changed, 15 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)
diff --git i/Documentation/config.txt w/Documentation/config.txt
index 84e2891aed..5b79411b4b 100644
--- i/Documentation/config.txt
+++ w/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -9,13 +9,21 @@ fallback values for the `.git/config` file. The file `/etc/gitconfig`
 can be used to store a system-wide default configuration.
 
 The configuration variables are used by both the Git plumbing
-and the porcelains. The variables are divided into sections, wherein
-the fully qualified variable name of the variable itself is the last
-dot-separated segment and the section name is everything before the last
-dot. The variable names are case-insensitive, allow only alphanumeric
-characters and `-`, and must start with an alphabetic character.  Some
-variables may appear multiple times; we say then that the variable is
-multivalued.
+and the porcelains. The variables are divided into sections, and some
+sections can have subsections.  In a variable name that is fully
+spelled out, the part up to the first dot is the section, the part
+after the last dot is the variable.  If these two dots are not the
+same, what's in the middle is the subsection.
+
+The section and the variable names are case-insensitive, allow only
+alphanumeric characters and `-`, and must start with an alphabetic
+character.  Often multi-word variable names are spelled in CamelCase
+by convention for extra readability.
+
+Some variables may appear multiple times and their effects accumulate;
+we say then that such a variable is multivalued.  For other variables, 
+when they appear more than once, the last one takes effect.
+
 
 Syntax
 ~~~~~~
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