Subject: Re: [PATCH] help: interpret help.autocorrect=1 as "immediate" rather than 0.1s

From: Taylor Blau <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2025 18:33:48 -0500

On Thu, Jan 09, 2025 at 01:18:15AM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> For the record, I do think it was a mistake to treat number values as
> "deciseconds" here, it is inconsistent with pretty much any other config
> setting. But I also don't see any way to remediate this design mistake at
> this stage.

I almost made this same mistake when working on pseudo-merge bitmaps, in
particular with the non-integral configuration options like:

  - bitampPseudoMerge.<name>.decay
  - bitampPseudoMerge.<name>.sampleRate

If memory serves, I think this mostly had to do with the lack of a
double parser in the config system. I ended up adding one in 5831f8ac41
(config: introduce `git_config_double()`, 2024-05-23), and made those
configuration options take values like '0.1', etc.

I think it may be worth considering what "starting from scratch" would
look like, as Junio suggested above. To be clear, I think that that
should happen outside of the current patch and not hold it up, as what
Scott is proposing is a strict improvement.

But it may be worth thinking about what a different interface might look
like. If we settle on something we like, perhaps we could start nudging
users towards it and "deprecate" the existing syntax.

> Thank you for working on this and making the feature at least a little bit
> more usable.

I concur.

Thanks,
Taylor