threads / discuss / 46986

Multiple paths in GIT_EXEC_PATH

Subject: Multiple paths in GIT_EXEC_PATH

## tl;dr

4 messages between Oct 17, 2017 and Oct 24, 2017.

replies: 3people: 4as markdown or json

Nikolay Yakimov· Oct 17, 2017, 15:21 UTC · lore

Hello. After updating to a recent git release (2.14, I believe, but possibly earlier), setting GIT_EXEC_PATH to multiple directories stopped working. It did work before, and I believe the culprit is 'git-sh-setup', which uses 'git --exec-path' output directly, while most other git components observe PATH syntax, i.e. multiple paths with colon separator. Is this intended, or is it an oversight?

For why I need that is another matter. Long story short, I need git to look for '.gitignore' in a particular non-standard location, since I have multiple git repositories in the same workdir (that workdir being $HOME and git repositories being stores for my different configs)

Kevin Daudt· Oct 17, 2017, 15:56 UTC · re: Nikolay Yakimov · lore

Re: Multiple paths in GIT_EXEC_PATH

On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 06:21:22PM +0300, Nikolay Yakimov wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Hello. After updating to a recent git release (2.14, I believe, but
> possibly earlier), setting GIT_EXEC_PATH to multiple directories
> stopped working. It did work before, and I believe the culprit is
> 'git-sh-setup', which uses 'git --exec-path' output directly, while
> most other git components observe PATH syntax, i.e. multiple paths
> with colon separator. Is this intended, or is it an oversight?
> 
> For why I need that is another matter. Long story short, I need git to
> look for '.gitignore' in a particular non-standard location, since I
> have multiple git repositories in the same workdir (that workdir being
> $HOME and git repositories being stores for my different configs)

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.

[0]:https://public-inbox.org/git/20170928223134.GA30744@varnish/

Junio C Hamano· Oct 17, 2017, 21:08 UTC · re: Kevin Daudt · lore

Re: Multiple paths in GIT_EXEC_PATH

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.

Dennis Kaarsemaker· Oct 24, 2017, 20:12 UTC · re: Nikolay Yakimov · lore

Re: Multiple paths in GIT_EXEC_PATH

On Tue, 2017-10-17 at 18:21 +0300, Nikolay Yakimov wrote:

> For why I need that is another matter. Long story short, I need git to
> look for '.gitignore' in a particular non-standard location, since I
> have multiple git repositories in the same workdir (that workdir being
> $HOME and git repositories being stores for my different configs)

That is solvable without needing multiple directories in $GIT_EXEC_PATH. vcsh, which also solves the 'multiple repos with same workdir' problem in a very thin wrapper around git, does this by setting core.excludesfile in the per repo config to a unique path.

hurricane:~$ vcsh dotfiles config core.excludesfile .gitignore.d/dotfiles hurricane:~$ vcsh secrets config core.excludesfile .gitignore.d/secrets

D.