Re: Bug? Bad permissions in $PATH breaks Git aliases

From: James Pickens <jepicken@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 27, 2012, 17:48 UTC
Message-ID: <CAJMEqRDodYQa_4vZ0+BZYS1+zL3e1iFXAMPgONbg8miEEs9wJQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v7gy6krei.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> James Pickens <jepicken@gmail.com> writes:
>> I'm not claiming that it's sane to have a broken PATH, but as I
>> mentioned in an earlier email, sometimes my PATH gets broken through
>> no fault of my own, and it would be nice if Git could be more helpful
>> in that case.
>
> Hrm, so which was more helpful in diagnosing the broken PATH?  Git by
> letting you be aware that there is some problem, or your shell by keeping
> me oblivious of the issue?

In this case the broken parts of my PATH were completely uninteresting to me - they didn't contain any executables that I would ever use. So if it didn't break my Git aliases, I could have continued working with the broken PATH and never known or cared that it was broken.

But I get your point - sometimes it's more helpful to let the user know something is amiss than try to guess what was intended. I just don't think this is one of those cases, mainly because Git's behavior is inconsistent with other programs. Git's behavior is not even consistent with itself - IMO, a PATH containing a directory that doesn't exist is just as broken as a PATH containing an inaccessible directory, but Git only has a problem with the latter. That doesn't make sense to me.

James