Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] config: read both home and xdg files for --global

On Sun, Aug 23, 2026 at 3:31 AM Delilah Ashley Wu
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi all, thanks for your patience. Here's my reroll.
>
> As reported in [1], `$HOME/.gitconfig` and `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config`
> are both valid global configuration locations. However, when both files
> exist, `git config list --global` only reads from the former location
> whereas `git config list` (without `--global`) reads from both. The same
> issue was reported for `git config get` in [2]. This inconsistency has
> no good justification and contradicts the documented behaviour.
>
> Suppose that `$HOME/.gitconfig` contains:
>     [home]
>         config = true
>
> and `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config` contains:
>     [xdg]
>         config = true
>
> Then, listing with `--global` shows only the home config:
>     $ git config list --global --show-scope --show-origin
>     global  file:/Users/delilah/.gitconfig    home.config=true
>
> and getting the XDG configuration entry with `--global` will fail:
>     $ git config get --global xdg.config; echo $?
>     1
>
> Git still reads the XDG config as part of its effective configuration,
> as shown by listing the configuration without `--global`:
>     $ git config list --show-scope --show-origin
>     global  file:/Users/delilah/.config/git/config    xdg.config=true
>     global  file:/Users/delilah/.gitconfig            home.config=true
>
> The documentation, quoted in [1] and [2], states that `--global` should
> read from both files ...

I have a related question: which of the global file(s) does

    git config --global --edit

edit? Which one(s) should it edit?

Chris