From: Fritz Anderson <fritza@uchicago.edu>
Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:27:42 GMT
Subject: Re: "fatal: index-pack failed" on git-clone
Message-ID: <47A38129-92A6-4CA5-8B79-E93CE9BF867B@uchicago.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20090708211201.GA21600@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Jul 8, 2009, at 4:12 PM, Jeff King wrote:

>  1. Hardlinking "git" into exec-path. That means we will always be  
> able
>     to find the wrapper, even if the PATH has been munged. Admittedly,
>     it sounds far fetched to me that something would exec from the  
> PATH
>     and then munge the PATH afterwards, but that seems to be what sudo
>     is doing (and it is pretty commonly used).

Here's an interesting experiment (RHEL 5):

=====
$ echo $PATH
/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/home/fritza/bin
$ cat >tryme.sh
echo $PATH
$ chmod a+x tryme.sh
$ sudo ./tryme.sh
/usr/bin:/bin

$ sudo git --exec-path
/usr/local/libexec/git-core
$ cat >tryme.sh
git --exec-path
$ ./tryme.sh
/usr/local/libexec/git-core
$ sudo ./tryme.sh
./tryme.sh: line 1: git: command not found
=====

That is to say, possibly there is some sudo magic that uses the  
invoker's PATH to find the command in the first argument. After that,  
however, PATH is a "safe" value. So if you invoke git via sudo, it  
will internally see a PATH different from the one at the time of  
invocation.

For what it's worth.

	— F