Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] sendemail: teach git-send-email to list aliases

From: SZEDER Gábor <szeder@ira.uka.de>
Date: Nov 17, 2015, 12:26 UTC
Message-ID: <20151117132644.Horde.0sLxtm6pFWvFfyP7Yzukk0F@webmail.informatik.kit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20151117072049.GA25414@flurp.local>

Quoting Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>:

Show 9 quoted lines

> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 12:10:35AM +0000, Keller, Jacob E wrote:
>> On Mon, 2015-11-16 at 18:50 -0500, Eric Sunshine wrote:
>> > It should be possible to extract the alias within the shell itself
>> > without a separate process. For instance:
>> >
>> >     read alias rest
>> >
>> > will leave the first token in $alias and the remainder of the line in
>> > $rest, and it's all done within the shell process.

Actually, putting this read in a while loop and feeding 'git send-email's output into that does fork() a subshell:

   $ echo "outside: $BASH_SUBSHELL" |while read line ; do echo "$line   
inside: $BASH_SUBSHELL" ; done
   outside: 0  inside: 1

Show 10 quoted lines

>> I'll look into this :)
>
> My reason for asking is concern about scripts possibly breaking if
> someone comes along and wants to "fix" --dump-aliases to also dump
> the alias expansions. One possibility is just to punt today and say
> that when that feature is needed in the future, then that someone can
> add a --verbose option to complement --dump-aliases which would emit
> the alias expansions as well. One nice thing about punting at this
> point is that we don't (today) have to define a format for the output
> of the expansions.

I think we should cross the bridge when we get to it.

However, we could still be nice to that brave soul who might want to cross it in the future, and since at this point we are interested in listing only alias names, perhaps we should not appropriate the broader '--dump-alias' option, but go with the more specific '--dump-alias-names' instead.

Gábor