Re: Multiple paths in GIT_EXEC_PATH

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 17, 2017, 21:08 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqo9p5mqit.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20171017155625.GE19335@alpha.vpn.ikke.info>

Kevin Daudt <me@ikke.info> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> The commit that changed what you described is 1073094f3 (git-sh-setup:
> be explicit where to dot-source git-sh-i18n from., 2016-10-29). That
> commit claims there were already scripts that assumed GIT_EXEC_PATH is
> just a single entry. That commit was included in v2.11.
>
> There was also a recent thread[0] about it that discussed this issue,
> where someone stated that indeed treating GIT_EXEC_PATH with the same
> semantics as PATH has been broken for a while, but it seems there are no
> real plans to fix it.

The variable was never meant to have more than one path concatenated with ':' from day one.

In C code we've used it as a leading directory path to tack a command name to form a path to give to exec(3), without any intention to have it a list of paths, which is split at ':'. sh-setup was doing "PATH=$GIT_EXEC_PATH:$PATH" without rejecting a value in GIT_EXEC_PATH with a colon in it but that was merely being lazy and made it "work" by accident.