From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:02:43 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] help: use man viewer path from "man.<tool>.path" config var
Message-ID: <7vabkv7t4c.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080318062236.7b5e515f.chriscool@tuxfamily.org>

Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org> writes:

> This makes it possible to use different version of the tools
> than the one on the current PATH, or maybe a custom script.
>
> In this patch we also try to launch "konqueror" using
> "kfmclient" even if a path to a konqueror binary is given
> in "man.konqueror.path".

It may be true that allowing customizable paths may be more useful than
not allowing them, so I do not have fundamental objection to this
enhancement.  However, I doubt this s/konqueror/kfmclient/ is a good idea.

As a general rule, if you allow the user to explicitly say "instead of
what you would normally use, use _this_", you should not try to outsmart
the user by using something else that you derived from that "_this_" the
user gave you.

If the user wants to use kfmclient, then the user can say so.  If the user
wants to really launch konq instead of using kfmclient for whatever
reason, the outsmarting code will interfere and make it impossible.