Hi Stefan & Jason, On Tue, 27 Mar 2018, Stefan Beller wrote: > On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 1:41 PM Jason Frey <jfrey@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > at which point you can see the duplicate sections (even though one is > > empty). Also note that if you do the steps again, you will be left > > with 3 sections, 2 of which are empty. This process can be repeated > > over and over. > > I agree that this is an issue for the user, and there were some attempts > to fix it in the past. (feel free to dig them up in the archive at > https://public-inbox.org/git) Note: as far as I remember, the attempted fixes were exclusively trying to remove the empty section. But this report suggests that we could instead *keep* empty sections, but then reuse them when a new value is added. > IIRC the problem is (a) with the loose file format (What if the user put > a valuable comment just after or before the '[branch "master"]' line?) > as well as (b) the way the parser/writer works (single pass, line by line) > > (b) specifically made it a "huge effort, but little return" bug, > so nobody got around for a proper fix. Yes, (a) makes removing an empty section something less of a desirable thing. Unless there are no comments before and after the section, of course, and yes, (b) is a real thing. On a positive note: I just finished work on a set of patches addressing this: https://github.com/git/git/compare/master...dscho:empty-config-section (I plan on submitting this tomorrow) Ciao, Dscho
