Configuration consolidation

Status: Project

Main proponents: DavidDemelier

This is a speculative project and does not represent any firm decisions on future behavior.

Make the .hgrc file more unified.

1. Goal

The goal of this project is to make a clear coding style regarding the .hgrc configuration options.

2. Detailed description

The current .hgrc configuration options is messed with many different styles:

• anoption (~ 192 options, many are unreadable)
• an_option (~ 8 options)
• an-option (~ 7 options)

Having a unified style makes the code cleaner, better integrated.

In addition, having guideline for sections would be useful. In Mercurial core + bundle extension we have about 300 configuration option. They are spread in the following sections:

     34 ui
     28 convert
     27 experimental
     21 web
     20 bugzilla
     19 lists
     13 notify
     10 format
     10 devel
      9 values
      9 profiling
      7 server
      6 smtp
      5 worker
      5 patchbomb
      5 http_proxy
      4 progress
      4 mq
      3 pager
      3 histedit
      3 factotum
      3 eol
      3 email
      2 transplant
      2 share
      2 phases
      2 paths
      2 patch
      2 merge
      2 hostsecurity
      2 gpg
      2 fsmonitor
      2 color
      2 chgserver
      2 bundle
      2 blackbox
      2 acl
      1 win32text
      1 win32mbcs
      1 shelve
      1 perf
      1 keywordset
      1 hook
      1 hgk
      1 fakepatchtime
      1 fakedirstatewritetime
      1 debug
      1 cmdserver
      1 censor
      1 bookmarks
      1 automv

There are *many* options is the [ui] section and many section with version few config. Gathering related option in the same config section have multiple advantage. The main one is that it gather the related option in the documentation improving discoverability. For the same reason, having too many option is the [ui] is drowning the important one in the help of more minor one.

2.1. Proposal for naming: allow _ and - anywhere

Since we have a strong backward compatibility concern, I have a proposal that I saw in a software a long time ago. The idea is to allow adding any underscore or hyphens in options and they are simply removed when loaded from the configuration.

Example:

[ui]
username = blabla

Is equivalent to

[ui]
user_name = blabla

Or even to

[ui]
us_er-na_me = blabla

When loading options, both underscores and hyphens will be simply discarded. This implementation will allow us renaming options in the .hgrc file without any restrictions and/or backward compatibility issues.

2.1.1. Proposal: use - or _ in config examples

While major options can be written in only one word, we should start using hyphens or underscores between words.

People who think that backgroundcloseminfilecount, graphnodetemplate, mergemarkertemplate are actually readable should consider stop programming.

2.1.2. Problems

Only options like post-<command> must not be mangled by the process of removing extraneous -_ characters.

What do to with them?

3. Roadmap

• Implement code to allow extra -_ characters

CategoryDeveloper CategoryNewFeatures