From: James Pickens Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:48:31 GMT Subject: Re: Bug? Bad permissions in $PATH breaks Git aliases Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <7v7gy6krei.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote: > James Pickens 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