Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/2] config: allow specifying config entries via envvar pairs

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 07:31:43 +0100

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 10:47:37PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> On 2020-11-25 at 10:41:14, Jeff King wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 11:50:46AM +0100, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> > I do still think that a "--config-env" option solves your problem in a
> > much simpler way (especially in terms of interface we expose to users
> > that we'll be locked into forever). I sketched out the solution below if
> > it's of interest (and I'd be happy to polish it up, or hand it off to
> > you if so). But if you're unconvinced, I'll stop mentioning it.
> 
> I do rather prefer this approach over the multiple key-value pairs.  I
> think the use case of scripts could probably be easily solved with an
> additional environment variable like so:
> 
>   args="--config-env abc.def=GHI --config-env jkl.mno=PQR"
> 
> This isn't necessarily super elegant, but I like it more than needing
> to handle many key-value pairs.
> 
> But while I do have a moderately strong preference, I'm not going to
> argue for blocking the series if you still want to go this way.

In the end, it probably boils down to taste. Both work to solve the
problem at hand while there are tradeoffs for other usecases for both.

Ultimately, those two ways are not mutually exclusive and we could even
implement both. So I might as well include Peffs patch in this series,
even though I'm not sure whether adding two new ways of doing things at
the same time would be welcome.

Patrick