Re: [msysGit] [PATCH/RFC] alias: use run_command api to execute aliases

From: Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 7, 2011, 14:24 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=6wG6khBAqLA8nki5-wbxQB-oYUAgMSqT-egpt@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.1101070216390.1542@bonsai2>

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 2:17 AM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> On Thu, 6 Jan 2011, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
>
>> On Windows, system() executes with cmd.exe instead of /bin/sh. This
>> means that aliases currently has to be batch-scripts instead of
>> bourne-scripts. On top of that, cmd.exe does not handle single quotes,
>> which is what the code-path currently uses to handle arguments with
>> spaces.
>>
>> To solve both problems in one go, use run_command_v_opt() to execute
>> the alias. It already does the right thing prepend "sh -c " to the
>> alias.
>
> Would this not break setups where aliases were defined to execute batch
> scripts?
>
> If this is true, I'm of two minds here.
>

It would indeed, but I wouldn't worry TOO much about it. We've clearly told the users that Git for Windows is a tool that you have to be willing to work on to use.

But I'm kind of of two minds here myself, but for a slightly different reason: I think Git for Windows SHOULD use cmd.exe to execute scripts. We should be able to lose the msys-environment and still have the basic functionality working. In that sense, this is a step in the wrong direction. But I'd rather have all code use the same code-path to execute scripts, and make a bit switch to cmd.exe together with porting all supplied scripts to batch-files some time in the future.