Re: [RFC] git --trace: trace command execution

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jun 25, 2006, 11:50 UTC
Message-ID: <7v3bdtv4h3.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <E1FuSIf-0004jK-Tp@moooo.ath.cx>

Matthias Lederhofer <matled@gmx.net> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Show parameters to execve/builtin-cmds before executing them. This
> version does not yet have a parameter --trace to git to enable this I
> just want to get feedback first :)
>
> I think this is quite useful to debug what is going on since a command
> may be another program (shell/python/perl/.. script etc) or just an
> alias for a internal command. Before that many commands became
> built-ins this was quite easy to do with strace.

Interesting. Debugging one's alias entries would be helped with this I would imagine, and for that you would want something like this:

> Example:
> % git showtag v1.4.1-rc1 > /dev/null
> trace: exec: /home/matled/local/stow/git/bin/git-showtag v1.4.1-rc1
> trace: exec failed: No such file or directory

* trace: expanded alias "showtag" => "cat-file tag"

> trace: built-in command: git cat-file tag v1.4.1-rc1

By the way "git cat-file -p" or "git verify-tag -v" might be more pleasant to view a tag since they make the tagger timestamp human readable.

> print_shell_escape will escape the arguments to be used as strings in
> the shell to prevent ambiguity with spaces and other special
> characters and make them copy-and-pastable.

Might be worth reusing quote.c::sq_quote(), perhaps?