git mergetool

Hello Git developers, and especially Theodore (whos email is in the footer of man git-mergetool)

Background:
   I am trying to use a custom mergetool with git.
   P4Merge from http://www.perforce.com/perforce/products/merge.html

   The documentation explains that environment variables $BASE,
$LOCAL, $REMOTE, $MERGED
   are set for the invocation of the mergetool command.

Problem:
   I wrote a wrapper for P4Merge, and I check for these environment
variables - but they are not there.
   After a closer inspection of git-mergetool I see that infact these
variables are not being sent to the
   external command at all, and are just in the context of the
git-mergetool script.

Solution:
   There are two ways, that i know of, to make the executed command
receive these variables :
     1. use "export" on them
     2. use "env LOCAL=$LOCAL env REMOTE=$REMOTE ....  $extcommand" to
set an environment for just that command

My System Information:
   git 1.5.5.1  (from macports)
   Mac OS X 10.5.2

Hopefully this will get fixed in future versions, so I wont need to patch git-mergetool locally on my machine with every update.

Regards, Evgeny