Investigate cherry-picking from forks

[hiddeco]

BTW, I found out about two maintained fork of gcfg:

• https://github.com/please-build/gcfg
• https://github.com/gravwell/gcfg

The first one apparently has a very very nice capability: being able to edit a config file without deleting the comments a user might have put there. It would be great to cherry pick those commits. See for example git-bug/git-bug#1022 how that can cause problems.

Originally posted by @MichaelMure in #1 (comment)

[MichaelMure]

Things that could be interesting:

• support utf8 BOM sequence on windows: https://github.com/go-gcfg/gcfg/pull/14/files
• support escaped double-quote in raw string literals: peterebden@f02745a

Now the "update a config without deleting comments" in https://github.com/please-build/gcfg is actually a fully separate parser with an AST. It has been developed in a series of PRs, each time squashed in a single commit:

• Insert field into config please-build/gcfg#9
• Inject section after comments if file only has comments in it please-build/gcfg#11
• Blank line functions please-build/gcfg#10
• Add CommentsAfter field to Section struct and API for adding them. please-build/gcfg#12
• Add function to get a section from the AST please-build/gcfg#13
• Revert comments after section please-build/gcfg#14
• Update ast.Read() to handle empty config values and curly braces please-build/gcfg#15

Full diff of all those changes: go-gcfg/gcfg@1dd97f8...please-build:gcfg:769ce29126941afed3bbfc7a200e59ed7c345dac

There is other things, but it's either 1) less obvious to me if it's useful or 2) the history is less exploitable, with changes spread over time.

[hiddeco]

The minefield here is mostly (copyright) licensing, having a LICENSE file in the root directory of the repository does not help (or cover) for this when not accompanied by a sign-off.

[MichaelMure]

All of those changes are covered by the exact same license AND copyright as this repo, so why would that be a problem? Why would you need a sign-off? Of course asking is the right thing to do, but I don't see why it would be legally required (admittedly, IANAL).

[MichaelMure]

About that AST thing, it looks like it could replace most of plumbing/format/config in go-git, and how gcfg is used for that.