Re: [PATCH/RFC 2/2] change all unchecked calls to setenv to xsetenv

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 01:10:27PM +0100, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
>>
>>> While reviewing some patches for Git for Windows, I realized that
>>> we almost never check the return-value from setenv. This can lead
>>> to quite surprising errors in unusual sitations. Mostly, an error
>>> would probably be preferred. So here we go.
>>>
>>> However, I'm not at all convinced myself that all of these make
>>> sense; in particular settings like GIT_EDITOR and GIT_PAGER could
>>> perhaps benefit from having a warning printed rather than a hard
>>> error.
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>
>> I wrote almost the same patch once[1], but failed to actually push it
>> through to acceptance.
>
> In both cases, the patches are _designed_ to fail to attract any
> attention.  Your earlier one had this preamble:
>
>  Here is a patch. I still feel a little silly writing this. The chances
>  that you will run out of memory doing setenv but _not_ doing any of the
>  other git operations seems very low.
>
> which rather *loudly* says "ignore me, please!" ;-)
>
> Erik's patch this round is no better; if its log message said something
> like "On platform X, the environment space is merely nKB and setenv has
> much higher chance of failing than on typical Linux boxes", it would have
> been a no brainer for me to respond with "makes perfect sense but don't we
> also use putenv?" immediately.
>