git-config: always treat --int as 64-bit internally

When you run "git config --int", the maximum size of integer
you get depends on how git was compiled, and what it
considers to be an "int".

This is almost useful, because your scripts calling "git
config" will behave similarly to git internally. But relying
on this is dubious; you have to actually know how git treats
each value internally (e.g., int versus unsigned long),
which is not documented and is subject to change. And even
if you know it is "unsigned long", we do not have a
git-config option to match that behavior.

Furthermore, you may simply be asking git to store a value
on your behalf (e.g., configuration for a hook). In that
case, the relevant range check has nothing at all to do with
git, but rather with whatever scripting tools you are using
(and git has no way of knowing what the appropriate range is
there).

Not only is the range check useless, but it is actively
harmful, as there is no way at all for scripts to look
at config variables with large values. For instance, one
cannot reliably get the value of pack.packSizeLimit via
git-config. On an LP64 system, git happily uses a 64-bit
"unsigned long" internally to represent the value, but the
script cannot read any value over 2G.

Ideally, the "--int" option would simply represent an
arbitrarily large integer. For practical purposes, however,
a 64-bit integer is large enough, and is much easier to
implement (and if somebody overflows it, we will still
notice the problem, and not simply return garbage).

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

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/t/t1300-repo-config.sh b/t/t1300-repo-config.sh
index 20aee6e17..b66c63262 100755
--- a/t/t1300-repo-config.sh
+++ b/t/t1300-repo-config.sh
@@ -652,6 +652,13 @@ test_expect_success numbers '
 	test_cmp expect actual
 '
 
+test_expect_success '--int is at least 64 bits' '
+	git config giga.watts 121g &&
+	echo 129922760704 >expect &&
+	git config --int --get giga.watts >actual &&
+	test_cmp expect actual
+'
+
 test_expect_success 'invalid unit' '
 	git config aninvalid.unit "1auto" &&
 	echo 1auto >expect &&