Subject: Re: RFC GSoC idea: new "git config" features

From: Matthieu Moy <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2014 12:01:44 +0100

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> If we had the keys in-memory, we could reverse this: config code asks
> for keys it cares about, and we can do an optimized lookup (binary
> search, hash, etc).

I'm actually dreaming of a system where a configuration variable could
be "declared" in Git's source code, with associated type (list/single
value, boolean/string/path/...), default value and documentation (and
then Documentation/config.txt could become a generated file). One could
imagine a lot of possibilities like

$ git config --describe <some-variable>
Type: boolean
Default value: true
Description: ...

Somehow, do for config variables what has been done for command-line
option parsing.

Migrating the whole code to such system would take time, but creating
the system and applying it to a few examples might be feasible as a GSoC
project.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/