Re: git 2.9.2: is RUNTIME_PREFIX supposed to work?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 27, 2016, 16:37 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq8tudqoxm.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqh991qpyn.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Paul Smith <paul@mad-scientist.net> writes:
>
>> On Mon, 2016-09-26 at 14:57 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>>> On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 2:32 PM, Paul Smith <paul@mad-scientist.net> wrote:
>>> > 
>>> > Hi all.  I'm trying to create a relocatable installation of Git 2.9.2,
>>> > so I can copy it anywhere and it continues to run without any problem.
>>> > This is on GNU/Linux systems, FWIW.
>>> 
>>> I had an impression that the setting was only to support MS Windows.
>>
>> Hm.  You may be right.  If so that's too bad, because a relocatable Git
>> is very handy even on UNIX systems.  Is there a reason for invoking the
>> subcommands by providing the plain command ("fetch", "merge-base") as
>> argv[0], rather than giving the fully-qualified path to a Git command?
>
> I do not think of any reason offhand. It just is that we never
> needed it.

If you are talking about invoking "git-fetch", then there is a very good reason. Built-in's do not need any actual binary on the filesystem (they only need "git").

But that does not have any relevance to the part below.

Show 5 quoted lines

> If you want to add support without making the resulting codebase too
> ugly, without breaking the classic way of installing into a fixed
> locations, and without breaking the existing support of platforms
> that does know the runtime-prefix thing, not just I wouldn't mind
> but I would welcome such an addition ;-)

If you can make runtime-prefix honored on more platforms, that would be good, though you _might_ have just added another "without" to the above list: without using full paths e.g. /usr/local/git/bin/git-fetch unconditionally.