Settings Sync: Ignore a setting locally

[weinand]

Refs: #89358

I tried to ignore the setting "editor.fontFamily" from being synced on linux (because I had issues with installing the nice coding fonts there).

So I added "editor.fontFamily" to the "sync.ignoredSettings" setting on linux.

But because "sync.ignoredSettings" is synced too, the setting now is ignored everywhere (which I didn't intend).

@sandy081 suggested to add "sync.ignoredSettings" to itself which seems to work..

But this approach appeared to be a kludge and it is very difficult to understand what is going on now. In order to understand whether a specific setting is synced, you have to check whether it is mentioned in the "sync.ignoredSettings" setting and then you have to check whether "sync.ignoredSettings" refers to itself...

What I would really like to have is a simple and direct way to exclude settings from syncing. E.g. adding a '!' as the first character of a settings name excludes it from syncing. Or nesting settings within a section named "!" or "nosync" excludes them all from syncing.

The "sync.ignoredSettings" approach is a bit ugly because it relies on another setting, which is again prone to another level of syncing complexity.

[sandy081]

But because "sync.ignoredSettings" is synced too, the setting now is ignored everywhere everywhere (which I didn't intend).

Is it that you want to ignore this setting on this machine or you want this to be synced only in linux platforms. This looks to me a scenario for platform specific settings.

[weinand]

Yes, in this specific case I could have used a linux specific setting.
But in general excluding settings from sync by using another setting that needs to be excluded from sync remains tricky...

[sandy081]

But in general excluding settings from sync by using another setting that needs to be excluded from sync remains tricky...

Agreed. But this setting is synced by default because If a user ignore a setting then it is expected to be ignored everywhere.

I do not see a use case of ignoring a setting only on local machine.

[weinand]

use case: for security reasons I do not want to leak a single setting to anywhere.

[sandy081]

Do you mean value of the setting or the setting id?

[sandy081]

Made current ignored setting to be always synced and cannot be ignored.

Moving this to backlog and will get back to this if we get a use case to have ignored setting which should not be synced.

[jsejcksn]

I have the same issue: I use the Fira Code typeface, specifically the Retina weight variation. It uses a different name for macOS vs Linux/Windows, so without having platform-specific setting support, this breaks for me either on the other platforms.

I think my issue is related, but not the same as the author's. I searched the open issues and this one was the closest, especially after reading this comment, but if you think I should post to a different issue, please advise.

[sandy081]

@jsejcksn your request is related to #5595

[jsejcksn]

your request is related to #5595

Thanks, yes a duplicate of this comment