Re: Add configuration options for some commonly used command-line options

[Brandon Williams <bmwill@google.com>]

On 03/20, Duy Nguyen wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 8:43 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
> <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 2:18 PM, brian m. carlson
> > <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> wrote:
> >> On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 11:15:33AM +0100, Matthieu Moy wrote:
> >>> I think the main problem is indeed "stop the users from shooting
> >>> themselves in the foot". Many command-line options change the behavior
> >>> completely so allowing users to enable them by default means allowing
> >>> the users to change Git in such a way that scripts calling it are
> >>> broken.
> >>>
> >>> This also doesn't help when troublshouting an issue as these options are
> >>> typically something set once and for all and which you forget about.
> >>> This typically leads to discussion in Q&A forums like:
> >>>
> >>> A: Can you run "git foo"?
> >>> B: Here's the result: ...
> >>> A: I don't understand, I can't reproduce here.
> >>>
> >>> just because B has a CLI option enabled by default.
> >>>
> >>> This is the same reasoning that leads Git to forbid aliasing an existing
> >>> command to something else.
> >>>
> >>> OTOH, we already have almost "enable such or such option by default"
> >>> with aliases. People who always run "git am" with "-3" can write
> >>>
> >>> [alias]
> >>>         a3 = am -3
> >>>
> >>> and just run "git a3".
> >
> > I can't find the E-Mail chain now but this has been discussed on-list
> > a while ago. I.e. having some getopt support to say for the push
> > command, that the --rebase option can also come from the config, i.e.
> > in this case the pull.rebase option.
> >
> > IIRC the consensus was that such a facility would allow commands or
> > individual options to say "this command/option is configurable", thus
> > of course all plumbing utilities would be unconfigurable, but
> > porcelain scripts would be configurable by default, with some
> > exceptions.
> 
> This is exactly it! It's much better than adding individual config
> variables (less work for sure, but messier). Maybe we should promote
> the microproject "Add configuration options for commonly used cmdline
> options" to project. If it's too short (I'm guessing the core code
> could be done in a month), the gsoc student can always convert more
> config to the new way.

If in the future we did want better support for making user defaults
(apart from aliases) for commands we could entertain creating a command
like bash's 'command' which ignores any user defaults and executes a
particular command in a vanilla mode.

So if the user configured 'git am' to always use the -3 option then
running `git command am` (or something akin to that) would just run the
vanilla 'am' command with no options.  Probably not the best idea since
tooling would need to become aware of such a paradigm change, but its
just a thought.

-- 
Brandon Williams