On Sat, Mar 25, 2017 at 11:32:02PM +0100, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> > So hopefully it's clear that the two are functionally equivalent, and
> > differ only in syntax (in this case we manually decided which options
> > are safe to pull from the config, but we'd have to parse the options.log
> > string, too, and we could make the same decision there).
>
> I like the simplicity of this approach a lot. I.e. (to paraphrase it
> just to make sure we're on the same page): Skip all the complexity of
> reaching into the getopt guts, and just munge argc/argv given a config
> we can stick ahead of the getopt (struct options) spec, inject some
> options at the beginning if they're in the config, and off we go
> without any further changes to the getopt guts.
Yep, I think that's an accurate description.
> There's two practical issues with this that are easy to solve with my
> current approach, but I can't find an easy solution to using this
> method.
>
> The first is that we're replacing the semantics of:
>
> "If you're specifying it on the command-line, we take it from there,
> otherwise we use your config, if set, regardless of how the option
> works"
>
> with:
>
> "We read your config, inject options implicitly at the start of the
> command line, and then append whatever command-line you give us"
>
> These two are not the same. Consider e.g. the commit.verbose config.
> With my current patch if have commit.verbose=1 in your config and do
> "commit --verbose" you just end up with a result equivalent to not
> having it in your config, but since the --verbose option can be
> supplied multiple times to increase verbosity with the injection
> method you'd end up with the equivalent of commit.verbose=2.
Right, for anything where multiple options are meaningful, they'd have
to give "--no-verbose" to reset the option. In a sense that's less
friendly, because it's more manual. But it's also less magical, because
the semantics are clear: the config option behaves exactly as if you
gave the option on the command line. So for an OPT_STRING_LIST(), you
could append to the list, or reset it to empty, etc, as you see fit.
But I do agree that it's more manual, and probably would cause some
confusion.
> I can't think of a good way around that with your proposed approach
> that doesn't essentially get us back to something very similar to my
> patch, i.e. we'd need to parse the command-line using the options spec
> before applying our implicit config.
Yes, the semantics you gave require parsing the options first. I think
it would be sufficient to just give each "struct option" a "seen" flag
(rather than having it understand the config mechanism), having
parse_options() set the flag, and then feeding the result to a separate
config/cmdline mapping mechanism. That keeps the complexity out of the
options code.
It does tie us back in to requiring parse-options, which not all the
options use.
In a lot of cases that "seen" flag is effectively a sentinel value in
whatever variable the option value is stored in. But some of the options
don't have reasonable sentinel values (as you noticed with the "revert
-m" handling recently).
> The second issue is related, i.e. I was going to add some flag an
> option could supply to say "if I'm provided none of these other
> maybe-from-config options get to read their config". This is needed
> for hybrid plumbing/porcelain like "git status --porcelain".
Yeah, I agree you can't make that decision until you've seen the
command-line options. I think we currently do some hairy stuff where we
speculatively read config into a variable, and then apply the
config-based defaults only when we know we're in non-porcelain mode (see
status_deferred_config in builtin/commit.c).
That came about because we didn't want to parse the config a second
time. These days the deferred config should probably just be read from
the cached configset, after we've read the other options.
But I think this can be done after the full option-parsing is finished
by applying the mapping then. I.e., something like:
parse_options(argc, argv, options, ...);
if (status_format != STATUS_FORMAT_PORCELAIN)
apply_config_mapping(status_mapping, options);
-Peff