On Sun, Apr 02, 2017 at 07:47:23AM +0200, Knut Omang wrote:
> From the documentation I would have expected
>
> git config --local user.email=alt.email@alt.domain
>
> to create a section
>
> [user]
> email=alt.email@alt.domain
>
> in the local .git/config.
When it sees one argument, git-config treats that argument as a key to
be retrieved. When given two, the second is a value to be set. E.g.:
$ git config foo.bar
$ git config foo.bar some-value
$ git config foo.bar
some-value
So your command was interpreted as a request to fetch the value, which
doesn't exist.
> Instead it returns status 1 with no error message.
Hopefully that explains the response you saw; we do not emit an error
message when a key isn't found, which makes it easy for scripts to do
things like:
value=$(git config foo.bar || echo default-value)
without being unnecessarily noisy.
Usually we'd catch an error like yours and complain, because the key is
syntactically invalid ("=" is not generally allowed in key names):
$ git config foo.bar=some-value
error: invalid key: foo.bar=some-value
But your argument actually _is_ a syntactically valid key, because of
the dots. In a three-level key like "one.two.three", the second level
subsection is allowed to contain any character (including "=" and more
dots). So your "user.email=alt.email@alt.domain" tries to look up the
config represented by:
[user "email=alt.email@alt"]
domain
Which of course did not exist.
> Is this intentional?
Yes, everything is working as intended. The documentation in
git-config(1) seems to be quite poor at describing the various operating
modes, though.
-Peff