Re: Recommend these .gitconfig settings for git integrity.

[Paul Eggert]

On 02/02/2016 07:49 AM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:

> I mean, it look like it does a good thing, if you read the
> description. So why it is not activated by default? Maybe it has some
> drawbacks.
Yes, it has a drawback. I mentioned it in my previous message. On some 
larger projects, it slows down some git operations. However, this does 
not seem to be a significant problem with Emacs development.

In contrast, omitting the option can cause significant problems later, 
problems that can be hard to discover and even harder to repair. For an 
example of this, please see the following bugreport on GitHub:

https://github.com/wp-cli/php-cli-tools/issues/70

Apparently the wp-cli project has a corrupted Git history that could 
have been prevented by the new setting. It is so much trouble to fix 
this that the project's maintainer and the GitHub staff think that 
fixing it is more trouble than it's worth, and will just live with the 
corrupted repository. I'd hate to see the same thing happen to the Emacs 
source code repository.

> Anyone cared about that possibility, apart from the "I
> activated it and so far, so good" testimony from*one*  individual?

I've been using it. So has Stefan, and Karl. Nobody who has used it has 
reported problems. If there were real problems with this option we 
should not make it the default.

I will look into modifying autogen.sh to make this flag optional, since 
there seems to be significant opposition to it. I still don't understand 
why there's so much opposition, though. If the Emacs repository becomes 
corrupted because this option was omitted, quite possibly we won't 
notice, and even if we notice quite possibly we won't fix it. I would 
hate to see that happen.