Subject: Re: [PATCH] gitweb: Use GITWEB_CONFIG_SYSTEM even if GITWEB_CONFIG does exist

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 May 2011 16:06:30 -0500

Jakub Narebski wrote:

> If per-instance configuration file exists, then system-wide
> configuration was _not used at all_.  This is quite untypical and
> suprising behavior.

I agree.  How to avoid breaking existing installations, though?  (I'm
especially worried because distro packages tend to ship their own
/etc/gitweb.conf, so the admin might not even know about what's
there.)  For example, depending on the content of /etc/gitweb.conf,
this has the potential to break "git instaweb".

It could be simpler to document that users should put

	do $GITWEB_CONFIG_SYSTEM;

at the start of gitweb_config.conf to reuse options from the system
configuration file and override them.  But that's not very satisfying,
since I don't see a nice way to move to a better behavior after that
without breaking some existing installations.  (It would be possible
to check for a new ./gitweb-config-in-addition-to-what-was-in-etc.conf
file but that doesn't seem so nice.)

If this were a command-line tool, I would be happy as long as there is
some way to prevent reading /etc/gitweb.conf through the environment.
For a webapp I don't know how easy it is to set environment variables
typically.  So thoughts from people in that corner of the world would
be interesting.