From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:43:34 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH/RFC 2/2] Provide a build time default-editor setting
Message-ID: <7v8weu6idl.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20091029075021.GC15403@progeny.tock>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> Provide a DEFAULT_EDITOR knob to allow the fallback editor (to
> use instead of vi if VISUAL, EDITOR, and GIT_EDITOR are unset) to
> be set at build time according to a system’s policy.  For
> example, on Debian systems, the default editor should be the
> 'editor' command.

I think we allow things like

    GIT_EDITOR='"/c/my program/vi" --i-like-color --config=$HOME/.myvicfg'

and the eval construct in git-sh-setup.sh is about supporting that kind of
insanity^Wflexibility.

My "how about" patch on DEFAULT_PAGER might be minimally safe with

    make DEFAULT_PAGER="/c/my program/less"

but if you are going to do this for real, you would need to use proper
quoting in the Makefile (look for _SQ for hints).

Also I do not think it allows this at all:

    make DEFAULT_PAGER='"/c/my program/less" --i-like-color'

It probably is Ok to force the "default" one to be just the path to the
command (i.e. not part of command line), but I thought this would be worth
pointing out.

> This change makes t7005-editor into a mess.  Any ideas for fixing
> this?

I think the introduction of DEFAULT_EDITOR makes it unfixable; your
DEFAULT_EDITOR may be set to '/usr/bin/vi' not 'vi'.

Just detect DEFAULT_EDITOR being not the default 'vi' and abort/skip the
entire test, perhaps?