Re: Teach the "git" command to handle some commands internally

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Feb 26, 2006, 23:22 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0602261518110.22647@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vbqwt7m3t.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> > There's one other change: the search order for external programs is 
> > modified slightly, so that the first entry remains GIT_EXEC_DIR, but the 
> > second entry is the same directory as the git wrapper itself was executed 
> > out of - if we can figure it out from argv[0], of course.
> 
> I am not sure about this part, though.

Well, what it means is that _if_ you install all your "git" binaries in some directory that is not in your patch and is not GIT_EXEC_DIR, they will still magically work, assuming you don't do something strange.

IOW, you can do things like

	alias git=/opt/my-git/git

and all the "git" commands will automatically work fine, even if you didn't know at compile time where you would install them, and you didn't set GIT_EXEC_DIR at run-time. It will still first look in GIT_EXEC_DIR, but if that fails, it will take the git commands from /opt/my-git/ instead of from /usr/bin or whatever.

It seemed a nice thing to try to make the git wrapper execute whatever git version it was installed with, rather than depend on PATH.

But hey, it's only a couple of lines out of the whole thing, so you can certainly skip it (remove the

	if (exec_path)
		prepend_path(exec_path)

lines to disable it).

		Linus