[TylerE]

Having lots of config is fine, even good, if you ship sane defaults. Frankly most OSS flunks this, and git is one of the biggest offenders.

[rjh29]

Git has so many users that changing defaults is pretty tricky. They have done it in the past but usually over multiple release cycles with a deprecation window.

[skissane]

Maybe they should introduce an option to configure which set of defaults is used.

e.g.

defaults=traditional adopts current defaults (that maximise backward compatibility)

defaults=latest adopts latest recommended defaults (better out-of-box user experience, but may break things which depend on the traditional settings)

Then at least there is only one setting to change to get sane defaults.

Maybe even, defaults=VERSION to give you latest defaults as per that version.

[nordsieck]

> Maybe they should introduce an option to configure which set of defaults is used.

> ...

> Then at least there is only one setting to change to get sane defaults.

I suspect that, much like C++, there will be fierce debate over exactly what constitutes sane defaults.

[bacon_waffle]

Maybe there could be a "C++ style defaults" set of configuration, as default?

[kenzniik]

Ah yes, like how nginx’s defaults still like to pretend it’s early 2000s, everyone uses dialup, and nobody could possibly want their website to serve more than a handful of requests per hour.

[jamesfinlayson]

Like Apache's default settings working well for a site that gets no more than one visitor a minute.