On 2020-11-25 at 10:41:14, Jeff King wrote:

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 11:50:46AM +0100, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

quoted

    - I've changed priorities. The envvars are treated as command-level
      and as such override all values configured in files. But any
      explicit `git -c key=value` will now override these envvars.

That ordering makes sense. Those get passed through the environment,
too, but at some point there is a process where your new ones are in the
environment and the "-c" ones are on the command-line.

Yeah, I agree this would be the right way to go.

I do still think that a "--config-env" option solves your problem in a
much simpler way (especially in terms of interface we expose to users
that we'll be locked into forever). I sketched out the solution below if
it's of interest (and I'd be happy to polish it up, or hand it off to
you if so). But if you're unconvinced, I'll stop mentioning it.

I do rather prefer this approach over the multiple key-value pairs.  I
think the use case of scripts could probably be easily solved with an
additional environment variable like so:

  args="--config-env abc.def=GHI --config-env jkl.mno=PQR"

This isn't necessarily super elegant, but I like it more than needing
to handle many key-value pairs.

But while I do have a moderately strong preference, I'm not going to
argue for blocking the series if you still want to go this way.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US