From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 19:13:43 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/4] Makefile: introduce SANE_TOOL_PATH for prepending required elements to PATH
Message-ID: <20090528191342.GF13499@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <8D9Pn2N3FZLQcyxrPABrGxTLa3Dlq25WDqK5xSJyY6cvQv4mphIUXvRu59EA7ewVS-vbi5IZUc4@cipher.nrlssc.navy.mil>

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 09:17:08PM -0500, Brandon Casey wrote:

> Some platforms (like SunOS and family) have kept their common binaries at
> some historical moment in time, and introduced new binaries with modern
> features in a special location like /usr/xpg4/bin or /usr/ucb.  Some of the
> features provided by these modern binaries are expected and required by git.
> If the featureful binaries are not in the users path, then git could end up
> using the less featureful binary and fail.
> 
> So provide a mechanism to prepend elements to the users PATH at runtime so
> the modern binaries will be found.

My concern with this is that the PATH bleeds over into things we execute
on behalf of the user, like GIT_EDITOR or snippets in git-filter-branch.
So we can end up surprising users that way.

On the other hand, I don't know how big a problem that is in practice. I
feel like any sane Solaris user is going to have xpg4 in their PATH
these days.

-Peff