Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Paul Smith <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
> 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.