Re: Re-evaluating the practice of automating user configuration

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hi Liliana,

Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Guix,
>
> as we all are more or less aware of, Guix automates quite much of the
> user's configuration for comfortably hacking on our codebase.  As has
> been argued elsewhere, both by myself and fellow Guix, this is not
> always a good thing.
>
> Let's start with the cleanest example of how to do things the right
> way: Our Emacs configuration is split across two files (one of which is
> a directory, but let's get back to that).  One of them are the
> directory-local variables stored in .dir-locals.el, the other the
> snippets in etc/snippets–if you're using YASnippet, the former loads
> the latter.  I have no qualms with this being automated, as Emacs
> itself gives me plenty opportunity of opting out of it.  I could
> declare any of the included variables or forms unsafe and ignore them
> in future sessions.  Likewise, I can mark them as safe to affirm my
> consent that these variables be changed in /path/to/guix/checkout.
>
> None of this holds for the git config, which we install unasked in the
> working tree with a DATA target that we want neither distributed nor
> installed otherwise.  This has led to confusion both in the mailing
> lists and the IRC on multiple occasions, so I'd propose we instead use
> PHONY targets for:
> 1. git-hooks to install the git hooks that committers need.
> 2. git-config to install all of the git config
>   a. git-config-diff to just install the diff xfuncs
>   b. git-config-format to just install the format block
>   c. git-config-pull to just install the pull block
>   d. git-config-sendemail to just install the sendemail block
> 3. git-fullconfig for both 1 and 2.

As argued before, going this route would have the following downsides:

1. the pre-push-hook would no longer be installed out of the box, which
could mean forgotting to sign a commit and having to ask Savannah folks
to drop the offending commit(s).  That's a blocker for me, at least
until we have a server-side hook that can guard against this.

2. The pre-push-hook could go stale (not self-updating).  That's likely
to happen as people would seldom run 'make git-hooks' to refresh them.

3. We'd loose some notifications for teams, likely for first submissions
from users that have yet to run 'make git-hooks', or from users who
chose not too.

4. We'd have more problems applying patches since the 'useAutoBase =
true' is not enabled by default, and documentation is a weak assurance
that users will do this.

> Internally, these would still be based on the actual file names to get
> time-stamps to work.  Thus, on a fresh pull or if you haven't pulled in
> a while, you can run either `git fullconfig` or any of the above to set
> things up.
>
> Incidentally, my .git/config currently reads the following:
>
> [include]
>       path = ../etc/git/gitconfig
>       path = ../etc/git/gitconfig
>       path = ../etc/git/gitconfig
>       path = ../etc/git/gitconfig

That should be fixed in Git.  'git config --add include.path
../etc/git/gitconfig' should not be re-adding the same entries over and
over if they are already there.

All in all, I guess my position is unchanged: despite the potential for
surprises, automating and enforcing these configs provide benefits that
outweigh the cons, in my experience/opinion.

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim