Re: [PATCH] -C/--chdir command line option

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 20, 2008, 05:41 UTC
Message-ID: <7vhc774ydr.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vr66b50gy.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> The only excuse I remember seeing in the thread was that "make has '-C'
> option, so let's have it, because it is similar", which does not justfiy
> addition of that option to git at all to me.

Just after having said that "make has it, so let's have it ourselves, too" is a non-excuse to any feature bloat, one thing I could accept a patch to imitate what "make" does, especially if we are going to actually clean up the startup sequence like we have discussed sometime ago to fix breakage around --work-tree, is to have VAR=VAL (e.g. "make CFLAGS=-O2") on the command line. We could use that syntax to allow configuration variables to be overridden, like so:

	$ git core.whitespace=cr-at-eol log -p master..next

I wouldn't however suggest allowing the syntax to set environment variables, like:

	$ git GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="A U Thor" commit

as this is something your shell lets you do easily, i.e:

	$ GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="A U Thor" git commit

But overriding some configuration variables for a single command invocation is not something you can do without actually editing the configuration file for some variables, so the former would be justified.