On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 08:11:27AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > I think the general feeling last time this came up was "why not just > > remove the cruft from your PATH?" But I would personally be OK with > > option (3) above, and it is probably not that hard to implement. > > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/171755/focus=171838 > shows that it was almost exactly a year ago; we tried (2) and nobody liked > it. I was actually thinking of: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/189077 > I got an impression from the discussion in it that #3 may give confusing > messages to the end users, but I didn't think the issues through. The implementation for #3 is straight-forward; I'll post the patches in a moment. However, it still ends up being confusing, because git ends up talking about permissions instead of offering its usual help. Here are a few cases with stock git and no broken entries in PATH: (1) $ git does-not-exist git: 'does-not-exist' is not a git command. See 'git --help'. (2) $ git cerry-pick git: 'cerry-pick' is not a git command. See 'git --help'. Did you mean this? cherry-pick (3) $ git config alias.broken does-not-exist $ git broken Expansion of alias 'broken' failed; 'does-not-exist' is not a git command (4) $ git config alias.ok '!echo ok' $ git ok ok Here are the same cases with a broken entry in PATH: $ mkdir foo; chmod 0 foo; PATH=$PWD/foo:$PATH (1) $ git does-not-exist fatal: cannot exec 'git-does-not-exist': Permission denied (2) $ git cerry-pick fatal: cannot exec 'git-cerry-pick': Permission denied (3) $ git broken fatal: cannot exec 'git-broken': Permission denied (4) $ git ok fatal: cannot exec 'git-ok': Permission denied Case (1) is OK; we report the differing error. But case (2) is worse, as we don't offer suggestions any more. Cases (3) and (4) are both worse, because we don't even try to expand the alias (whether it would work or not). Here are the same cases with my patches: (1) $ git does-not-exist Failed to run command 'does-not-exist': Permission denied (2) $ git cerry-pick Failed to run command 'cerry-pick': Permission denied (3) $ git broken Expansion of alias 'broken' failed; 'does-not-exist': Permission denied (4) $ git ok ok This is somewhat improved. Case (4) now runs the alias. Case (3) has a better error message, which is that it tells you it was not "broken" which was a problem, but its subcommand. But the "permission denied" error still ends up being somewhat confusing. And in case (2), you don't get a list of suggestions (nor should you, because we still don't know whether "cerry-pick" exists and cannot be executed, or if there is a broken directory in the PATH). So we've made the situation better, but it's still way less nice than having a fixed PATH. Which makes me wonder if this half-way effort is worth it. -Peff -- 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