Re: Recommend these .gitconfig settings for git integrity.

[Óscar Fuentes]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

> On 02/01/2016 08:51 AM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
>> I would prefer a `make' target or script
>
> It is already in a script,

Oh, please...

> and the script plainly notifies developers
> of the changes it makes to files under ./.git.

That's a good thing, but still not enough. For starters, if I edit
.git/config, next time autogen.sh is run it will revert the edits,
right? The script I use for building Emacs contains

git clean -f -d -x
./autogen.sh

... to ensure that the build is not tainted by previous builds.

How about mentioning (not applying) the recommended settings on
autogen.sh, with instructions for running a script that makes the
changes? That ensures that the user is aware of the changes, and agrees
with them.

[snip]

>> There is nothing Emacs-specific on those settings
>
> Each of those settings is there to support Emacs development.

How those settings benefit Emacs development? (In contrast to any other
project that uses git.) I asked that on my first message, but there is no
answer yet.

> It is true that other projects could use similar settings. For
> example, another project could also check that commit messages be in
> UTF-8. However, such a check is not appropriate for Git in general, as
> Git supports developers who use non-UTF-8 encodings for their commit
> messages. So we can't rely on vanilla Git to check that commit
> messages use UTF-8.

Okay, you explained why Emacs checks that UTF-8 is used on the commit
messages of their repo (I thought that git records the text encoding and
then converts it before display; that's basic functionality for a
distributed VCS, but if you say that an explicit setting is required for
avoiding making a mess of the VC history, I believe you.)

Now, what about the reasoning for the recent changes, in the context of
Emacs development? (Other than "they look like a good thing to me, so I
will put them on everyone's repo.")