1758777 - Nano is preferred over Mercurial's ui.editor setting because of HGEDITOR

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: MozillaBuild, task)

Description

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

I'm still getting nano as my Mercurial editor despite my mercurial.ini config specifying vim because the HGEDITOR env var is set to nano in the v4 prerelease.

STR:

• Install the mozillabuild v4 prerelease.
• Start a shell via the provided start-shell.bat
• Run hg config -e and set editor = vim in the [ui] section.
• Run hg config -e again (or another hg command).

Actual result:
The editor opened is nano.

Expected result:
The editor opened in vim.

Further info:

• I can get vim selected by unsetting the HGEDITOR env var.
• I think this is caused by this line and because HGEDITOR has high precedence than the config file.

Comment 1

[Mitchell Hentges [:mhentges] 🦀]

Ah, thanks for the report, that aligns with the mercurial docs.
I'll shuffle it over to our packaged mercurial.ini file instead.

Comment 2

[Mitchell Hentges [:mhentges] 🦀]

Attachment: Bug 1758777: Move hg config to system mercurial.ini instead of env var

As documented in the mercurial docs [1], $HGEDITOR overrides the
user's mercurial.ini config. Since MozillaBuild's editor configuration
is supposed to be a convenient //fallback// setting, we should lean on
the "system" mercurial.ini config file instead, since it's more
override-able.

Unfortunately, though un-documented, $EDITOR overrides the system
ui.config setting. So, we have two options:

1. Move the 72-char-limit nano config to $EDITOR: this is incorrect
   since $EDITOR may be used in non-VCS-commit contexts.
2. Unset $EDITOR: this isn't ideal because we don't have any other
   mechanism for providing system-default git options.

Out of these options, option 1 seems more acceptable to avoid unexpected
behaviour in the future. Besides, using git in MozillaBuild is already
edge-case-y, so hopefully users opting in to it will also be comfortable
with setting their editor.

[1] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/editor

Comment 3

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-build/rev/f1f40d18531d
Move hg config to system mercurial.ini instead of env var r=ahochheiden

Comment 4

[Mitchell Hentges [:mhentges] 🦀]

Attachment: Bug 1758777: Workaround so Git uses "nano", retaining hg editor config

When writing D140737, I missed a third option that gives us the best of
both worlds:

• git should use nano.exe by default, but will honour user
  configuration
• hg should use nano.exe with our custom configuration (-b -r 72)

The only way to influence git in an overridable way was via $EDITOR,
which would override our only mechanism for configuring hg.
However, if we set $EDITOR, but //unset it only when using hg//,
then everybody wins :)

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-build/rev/2c7ad1ac65be
Workaround so Git uses "nano", retaining hg editor config r=ahochheiden