Frans Klaver wrote: > Just for my understanding: before a command is executed, a pager > (less/more or so) is started? We want to avoid starting the pager if > we won't be able to execute the command? See [1] for an example of a recent patch touching the relevant code path. For example: if I run "git --paginate foo", foo is an alias for bar, and the "[pager] bar" configuration is set to point to "otherpager", then without this safety git launches the default pager in preparation for running git-foo, receives ENOENT from execvp("git-foo"), and then the pager has already been launched and it is too late to launch otherpager instead. > On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I want to like (b), but the downside seems unacceptable. > > The downside being: having to figure out what execvp is going to do? > That would be tantamount to writing your own execvp. Exactly. >> I honestly >> don't know if something like (a) would be a good idea if well >> executed, so I was happy to have the opportunity to try to help >> massage these patches into a form that would make the answer more >> obvious. > > Given the above information, I'm happy to work on this I see. Well, as I said, I don't know. :) And I don't want to give false hopes --- it's perfectly possible and not even unlikely that this is a dead end and any patch in this direction will turn out not to be a good idea and not applied. That's part of why I was really grateful to Hannes for the reminder to take a step back for a moment and consider whether it's worth it. Maybe there's another way or a more targetted way to take care of the motivational original confusing scenario that leads to execvp errors. (By the way, can you remind me which one that was?) Jonathan [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/179635 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html