I really do not care about all the possible paths a config file might be read from. I want a flag that I can pass to a binary to see which paths it will actually read, and ideally, I'd like those paths to be logged to STDOUT on startup.
Yes, I want to know which files in which order.cI don't want a static list of all possible locations, I want it to deduce what files would take effect in a given environment and with the given config files - a program must already know this when it is ran - so let's just be open and print said paths.
Absolutely. For example, if you pass "-v" to ssh, it prints paths to configs that it tried to open, paths to identity files that it tried to open, to known_hosts files, etc. This info is not needed so very often, but when it is, it's incredibly useful.
Yes. Exactly. Which is why the program should tell you which one takes precedence.
The program already knows what config files it's loading and in what order, so why is it left up to the human to do all that work again? There should be a flag like --manifest or something that would spit out what actually got loaded from where.
