Re: [PATCH] gitk: Add ability to define an alternate temporary directory

From: David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 11, 2009, 16:44 UTC
Message-ID: <20091111164451.GA45475@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vr5s5y8n8.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 08:42:35PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > That said, if there's a consensus that the path doesn't matter
> > much than we could change the behavior.  I was just trying to be
> > careful.
> 
> If we are not honoring GITK_TMPDIR and suddenly start paying attention to
> it, that already is a change in behaviour.  Why is it better than paying
> attention to TMPDIR?

True.

> But why does gitk, which is primarily a read-only history browsing tool
> (yes, I know it can do "checkout" and stuff), needs to write anything to
> anywhere in the first place?

It happens when you click on a commit, right-click on a file and then choose "external diff".

gitk writes file@commit and file@commit^ to temporary files and diffs them using an external diff tool.

Shall I reroll with s/GITK_TMPDIR/TMPDIR/ ?

gitk was written before git-difftool existed. A higher impact change would be to change gitk to use git-difftool instead of managing its own temporary files.

If we're looking for the ideal solution than that is probably it. The only downside is that gitk would stop working with git versions < 1.6.3. That doesn't seem like a real issue, though, because gitk is bundled with git.

Thoughts?

-- 
		David