On Sun, 2017-04-02 at 03:38 -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> 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.
Ah - I see!
Thanks for the quick answer and excellent explanation,
and sorry for the confusion - I should know well that config takes
the write argument after a blank.
I think I'll go and get myself another cup of coffee
before I ask more questions anywhere...
Regards,
Knut
>
> -Peff