config: silence warnings for command names with invalid keys

When we are running the git command "foo", we may have to
look up the config keys "pager.foo" and "alias.foo". These
config schemes are mis-designed, as the command names can be
anything, but the config syntax has some restrictions. For
example:

  $ git foo_bar
  error: invalid key: pager.foo_bar
  error: invalid key: alias.foo_bar
  git: 'foo_bar' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

You cannot name an alias with an underscore. And if you have
an external command with one, you cannot configure its
pager.

In the long run, we may develop a different config scheme
for these features. But in the near term (and because we'll
need to support the existing scheme indefinitely), we should
at least squelch the error messages shown above.

These errors come from git_config_parse_key. Ideally we
would pass a "quiet" flag to the config machinery, but there
are many layers between the pager code and the key parsing.
Passing a flag through all of those would be an invasive
change.

Instead, let's provide a config function to report on
whether a key is syntactically valid, and have the pager and
alias code skip lookup for bogus keys. We can build this
easily around the existing git_config_parse_key, with two
minor modifications:

  1. We now handle a NULL store_key, to validate but not
     write out the normalized key.

  2. We accept a "quiet" flag to avoid writing to stderr.
     This doesn't need to be a full-blown public "flags"
     field, because we can make the existing implementation
     a static helper function, keeping the mess contained
     inside config.c.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/alias.c b/alias.c
index 6aa164a36..a11229db9 100644
--- a/alias.c
+++ b/alias.c
@@ -5,7 +5,8 @@ char *alias_lookup(const char *alias)
 	char *v = NULL;
 	struct strbuf key = STRBUF_INIT;
 	strbuf_addf(&key, "alias.%s", alias);
-	git_config_get_string(key.buf, &v);
+	if (git_config_key_is_valid(key.buf))
+		git_config_get_string(key.buf, &v);
 	strbuf_release(&key);
 	return v;
 }