On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 10:02:31AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > Do we need to define "hostname" in more detail here? Specifically, I'm > > wondering whether the result will be a FQDN or not (i.e., the output of > > "hostname" vs "hostname -f"). Looking at the code I think it will just > > be the short name returned. That's probably OK, but it may be worth > > documenting. > > That was my first reaction but there are places where "hostname" > already gives a name that is not "short" at all, without being > invoked with "-f". Thanks, that was the vague buzzing in the back of my head that led to my first comment. It has been a while since I've dealt with this, but I think in some circles it is a holy war akin to tabs vs spaces. A quick search shows I am not alone: https://serverfault.com/questions/331936/setting-the-hostname-fqdn-or-short-name So I think we probably need to say something like: Depending on how your system is configured, the hostname used for matching may be short (e.g., "myhost") or a fully qualified domain name ("myhost.example.com"). > I think the most honest answer we can give in the documentation is > that we use what gethostname() [*] gives. That is honest, but I wonder if it is very useful to most users, as they cannot easily see what it returns. It's tempting to give an extra note like this tacked on to what I said above: You can run the hostname(1) tool to see which hostname your system uses. But I'm not sure that it is available everywhere (especially Windows). I guess we could provide "git config --show-hostname-for-includes" or something, but that feels like overkill. Maybe just the "Depending..." note is enough, and people who are interested in hostname conditionals hopefully know enough to dig further on their system. What I think we want to avoid is saying nothing, and then somebody tries "foo.example.com", finds that it doesn't work, and gets confused with no hints about why. I guess yet another alternative is to try to qualify the name ourselves using getaddrinfo(), either unconditionally or if the hostname doesn't contain a ".". That may involve a DNS lookup, though (if your hostname isn't in /etc/hosts). -Peff
