Hi, when I tried to reuse and extend 'config_from_gitmodules' in https://public-inbox.org/git/20180514105823.8378-2-ao2@xxxxxx/ it was pointed out to me that special care is needed to make sure that this function does not get abused to bring in arbitrary configuration stored in the .gitmodules file, as the latter is meant only for submodule specific configuration. So I thought that the function could be made private to better communicate that. This is what this series is about. Patch 1 moves 'config_from_gitmodules' to submodule-config.c Patches 2 and 3 add helpers to handle special cases and avoid calling 'config_from_gitmodules' directly, which might set a bad example for future code. Patch 4 makes the symbol private to discourage its use in code not related to submodules. Patches 5 and 6 enable reusing 'config_from_gitmodules' when it's safe to do so. Patches 7 is just a cleanup and I am not even sure it is worth it, so we might as well just drop it. The series can be seen as a continuation of the changes from https://public-inbox.org/git/20170802194923.88239-1-bmwill@xxxxxxxxxx/ Even though the helper functions may be less elegant than what was done back then, they should better protect from misuse of config_from_gitmodules. A further change could be to print warning messages when the backward compatibility helpers find configuration in .gitmodules that should not belong there, but I'll leave that to someone else. Thanks, Antonio P.S. I added Jeff King to CC as he has done some work related to .gitmodules recently, and I removed the vcsh poeple on this one. Antonio Ospite (7): config: move config_from_gitmodules to submodule-config.c submodule-config: add helper function to get 'fetch' config from .gitmodules submodule-config: add helper to get 'update-clone' config from .gitmodules submodule-config: make 'config_from_gitmodules' private submodule-config: pass repository as argument to config_from_gitmodules submodule-config: reuse config_from_gitmodules in repo_read_gitmodules submodule-config: cleanup backward compatibility helpers builtin/fetch.c | 15 +-------- builtin/submodule--helper.c | 8 ++--- config.c | 17 ---------- config.h | 10 ------ submodule-config.c | 66 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------- submodule-config.h | 12 +++++++ 6 files changed, 71 insertions(+), 57 deletions(-) -- Antonio Ospite https://ao2.it https://twitter.com/ao2it A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?