Re: Weird problem with git-submodule.sh

From: Stefano Lattarini <stefano.lattarini@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 9, 2012, 21:05 UTC
Message-ID: <50C4FD00.4010003@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vobi5fu3c.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Hi Junio, Marc.

On 12/07/2012 10:08 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Marc Branchaud <marcnarc@xiplink.com> writes:
> 
>> It's FreeBSD 7.2, which I know is an obsolete version but I'm not able to
>> upgrade the machine.  I believe FreeBSD's sh is, or is derived from, dash.
> 
> Finally.  Yes, as you suspected, I am perfectly fine to explicitly
> set IFS to the default values.
> 
> I wanted to have specific names to write in the commit log message,
> in-code comments and possibly release notes.  That way, people can
> decide if the issue affects them and they should upgrade once the
> fix is made.
>

The Autoconf manual suggests against unsetting IFS instead of resetting it to the default sequence for yet another reason: if IFS is unset, code that tries to save and restore its value will incorrectly reset it to an empty value, thus disabling field splitting:

    unset IFS
    # default separators used for field splitting
    # ...
    saved_IFS=$IFS
    IFS=:
    # code using the new IFS
    IFS=$saved_IFS
    # no field splitting performed from now on!

Not sure how this is relevant for the Git codebase, but maybe it is something worth reporting in the commit message of a proposed patch.

Regards,
  Stefano