Subject: Re: [PATCH] bugreport: add tool to generate debugging info

From: Emily Shaffer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2019 18:25:19 -0700

On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 04:40:50PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Emily Shaffer <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > I think a whitelist of config options to print would grow stale
> > immediately, and the options we're missing would be very likely to be
> > configs to turn on new experimental features - which is probably what we
> > most want the bugreport for.
> 
> The implementation of your "git bugreport" command comes from the
> same version of Git as such an experimental feature you want
> feedback to is shipped with, so I am not sure where your concern
> about staleness comes from.
> 
> If you really care about getting quality reports, you need to earn
> users' trust (one way of doing so would be to maintain a good "list
> of benign configuration knobs whose values help diagnosing issues"),
> and you need to make sure we obtain relevant pieces of information.
> Both of these things are something you need to actively work on.
> 
> We have trained ourselves to the point that we consider it a bug if
> you add a new command git-bugreport without adding a corresponding
> pattern in the .gitignore file.  And thanks to that discipline, we
> have been fairly good at keeping .gitignore up to date.  I do not
> see a reason why we cannot do something similar to the registry of
> configuration variables that we care about, which may be shipped as
> part of "git bugreport" command.

I think comparing this habit to the .gitignore isn't quite fair -
.gitignore tells me I forgot to add my new command binary to it, when I
run `git status` to see what I need to add to my commit with new
command.

But, I agree that it's not going to be possible to create a completely
leakproof blacklisting heuristic here. So I'll use a whitelist for the
next patchset.

 - Emily