From: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:43:55 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-svn: Allow using arguments to the editor.
Message-ID: <200902181643.59516.trast@student.ethz.ch>
In-Reply-To: <20090218144814.GA23938@anguilla.debian.or.at>

Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
>  I'm not sure where quoted spaces and such are handled very much
> differently. How would you quote it that wouldn't make tons of programs
> fail? EDITOR='"/my space path/prog"' doesn't work in most applications
> because they wouldn't strip the embedded quotes, neither does
> EDITOR='/my\ space\ path/prog' work. EDITOR='/my space path/prog' might
> work in some (current git-svn) but not in all.

I have EDITOR='emacs -nw' and it works for git, svn and hg.  (Which
are roughly the ones I care about.)

>  I haven't looked into how git does it directly, but it offers that
> posibility:
> EDITOR="vim -c 'syn off'" git commit -a
> 
>  I wasn't able to figure out any way to use a space-embedded filename in
> EDITOR for git - so why should git-svn behave differently here? But you
> are right, this very example shows clearly that my approach is
> incomplete because it can't handle the 'syn off' part.

launch_editor (in editor.c) does roughly the following in Perl:

  # set $editor according to config/variables
  my @editor = ($editor);
  if ($editor =~ /["$\t ]/) {
      @editor = ('sh', '-c', $editor . ' "$@"', $editor);
  }
  system(@editor, @rest_of_args);

I'm not a Perl expert but that's my current educated guess of what it
translates to ;-)

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch