Re: [PATCH 4/4] Makefile: introduce SANE_TOOL_PATH for prepending required elements to PATH

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 29, 2009, 05:13 UTC
Message-ID: <7v63fkh4od.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090528191342.GF13499@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 19 quoted lines

> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 09:17:08PM -0500, Brandon Casey wrote:
>
>> Some platforms (like SunOS and family) have kept their common binaries at
>> some historical moment in time, and introduced new binaries with modern
>> features in a special location like /usr/xpg4/bin or /usr/ucb.  Some of the
>> features provided by these modern binaries are expected and required by git.
>> If the featureful binaries are not in the users path, then git could end up
>> using the less featureful binary and fail.
>> 
>> So provide a mechanism to prepend elements to the users PATH at runtime so
>> the modern binaries will be found.
>
> My concern with this is that the PATH bleeds over into things we execute
> on behalf of the user, like GIT_EDITOR or snippets in git-filter-branch.
> So we can end up surprising users that way.
>
> On the other hand, I don't know how big a problem that is in practice. I
> feel like any sane Solaris user is going to have xpg4 in their PATH
> these days.

I share that feeling, in which case the patch should be no-op.

But I recall the "how about this" patch was done as an illustration of a possible approach to solve breakage in _tests_; the patch actually does not touch t/Makefile and would not help tests.