I recently submitted my first patch using OSX and found the experience frustrating, for reasons that have come up on the list before, concerning git-send-email and perl dependencies that you need to be root to update. Last seen here: https://public-inbox.org/git/878t55qga6.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ The struggle is that Mac's package manager Homebrew has opted, apparently with some finality, to no longer support linking to a user perl at build time. PERL_PATH is hard-coded to link to the system perl, which means the user needs sudo to install the SSL libraries required for send-email. So for send-email to work, you need to either sudo cpan or build git yourself. The obvious solution here would be to do /usr/bin/env perl, but in the above message Aevar pointed out pitfalls with that. It seems that choosing perl at compile time necessarily comes with tradeoffs. So I wonder if there is a way we can support choosing a perl at runtime without breaking the existing mechanism of linking to perl at compile time. I'm picturing adding an executable "git-perl" to libexec that checks config core.perlPath and envvar GIT_PERL_PATH, in some order. Having chosen one of these or the build-time PERL_PATH as a last resort, it exec's the correct perl executable. Then relevant scripts (e.g. git-add--interactive, git-send-email) invoke git-perl instead of /usr/bin/perl, and the makefile no longer replaces that with PERL_PATH -- instead that will be used at runtime via git-perl when we can be sure the user does not explicitly prefer something different. That does mean we have a new command to support and document: "git perl". If it is preferred to keep this hidden as an implementation detail, we could call the executable something like "util-git-perl" instead so that it doesn't show up when scanning libexec for git commands. Does this seem like a good idea? I'd be happy to work on a patch.
