[Confuse-devel] silently absorbing duplicate sections with the same title

[Brian Fallik]

We've recently found a behavior in confuse which is impairing our
ability to trap certain error conditions for our application.  We'd like
to be able to catch the case where a user repeats a section/title
combination.  This is most likely due to a copy+paste error, and has
already occurred at least once for us.

I've tracked the issue into confuse.c, and found the following lines to
be involved:
574 mhe   1.21                     if(is_set(CFGF_NOCASE, cfg->flags))
575                                {
576 mhe   1.20                         if(strcasecmp(value, sec->title)
== 0)
577                                        val = opt->values[i];
578 mhe   1.21                     }
579                                else
580                                {
581 mhe   1.20                         if(strcmp(value, sec->title) ==
0)
582                                        val = opt->values[i];
583                                }
(from confuse.c:1.27 at http://savannah.nongnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/...

This tracks back to version 1.2 of the file, which has the log message
"imported version 2.0 sources". 

With these lines, libconfuse silently overwrites the old section/title
combination with information from the new matching section/title.  Is
this the intended behavior?  If so, is there a strategy an application
can use to trap this and handle it itself?

I've written a patch to confuse.c which calls cfg_error() and returns
when the titles match in the lines above.  However, would it make sense
to provide a CFGF_NOTITLEDUPES setting which only applies to sections
and, if set, calls cfg_error?

Thanks,
brian