From: Junio C Hamano Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 05:13:54 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/4] Makefile: introduce SANE_TOOL_PATH for prepending required elements to PATH Message-ID: <7v63fkh4od.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <20090528191342.GF13499@coredump.intra.peff.net> Jeff King writes: > 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.