possible to sandbox git-config per profile?

[cakekindel]

hi, great project here. would it be possible to use per-profile git configuration? that would solve the per-profile GPG signing issue along with many other potential future asks

[dmfutcher]

Hey @cakekindel, glad you're enjoying the tool & thanks for suggesting this feature.

This is definitely something that I'd like to support. Right now git-profile works by setting the name & email config values, extending this to arbitrary config values shouldn't throw up any major problems.

I think there is some complexity around profile defaulting ie. if there's no profile explicitly activated in a repo, but the global name/email matches a profile, we say that that profile is in use. But if you had a config setting on that profile that isn't set up as a git global config, the UI would say the profile is in use, but you wouldn't have the config options set. I think that whole system of defaults (and the UI in general!) needs a significant overhaul anyway.

[cakekindel]

Awesome! My pie-in-the-sky UI would look something like this, mimicking the existing git ui wherever possible:

command	use	flags
git profile new <name>	create a new git profile with name <name> with no profile-specific configuration values	none
git profile switch <name>	switch to a git profile, changing the name, email, and any other configuration set in that profile	-c / --create - create profile if not exists
git profile config get	get all config values for a profile	-p <name>/--profile <name> - (required) profile to read config from
git profile config get <key>	get a config value for a profile	-p <name>/--profile <name> - (required) profile to read config from
git profile config set <key>=<value>	set a config value for a profile, whether active or not. If active, immediately applies the value to git-config	-p <name>/--profile <name> - (required) profile to apply changes to

following this, values like user.username, user.email, user.signingkey would be set in the same way as the global gitconfig.

In terms of implementation, I can't think of a pretty version. Maybe a first blush would be creating a .gitconfig for each profile and appending it to the user's global .gitconfig, something like:

[user]
username = cakekindel
name = Orion Kindel

[commit]
gpgsign = true

[gpg]
program = gpg2

[init]
defaultBranch = main

# >>> DO NOT EDIT, AUTOGENERATED BY git-profile
    # insert profile config
# <<<

[cakekindel]

Curious about your thoughts on this @dmfutcher!

Happy to help implement this by the way, as there's quite a bit of hidden complexity there. Converting the TUI git config syntax section.key=value to [section]\n\tkey = value, parsing .gitconfig files, cross-platform FS interaction

[dmfutcher]

Hey @cakekindel, that UI looks reasonable to me. I've been trying to think of a UI where the profile name is the first argument as it's the primary thing we want to act on/with (git profile <profile-name> <action> <...>). Would let us avoid the slightly awkward -p flags, but then it gets fiddly and frustratingly verbose if you want to act on the currently enabled profile.

There's another possible hurdle that I've thought of for this feature: right now the profiles are set locally per-repo. cd .. out of the repo loses your profile & therefore settings. But I can imagine (no concrete example of this yet, I rarely fiddle with git config myself) there are global config settings which we'd like to apply from profiles? So that breaks the current model a bit. Can you tell git-profile is a fairly proof-of-concept hack yet? 😅

Happy to redesign the whole overall model of how this works to enable a much more powerful tool. But haven't had any moments of inspiration about exactly how to do this yet! Wonder what your thoughts are here?