On 2020-06-04 at 23:33:16, Steven Penny wrote: > The Git pager is set up by the function `setup_pager` [1]. `setup_pager` calls > `prepare_pager_args` [2]. `prepare_pager_args` sets `use_shell` [3]. Then > `setup_pager` calls `start_command` [4]. Then, since `use_shell` has been > defined, `prepare_shell_cmd` is called [5]. Finally, regardless of operating > system, `sh` is called [6]: > > #ifndef GIT_WINDOWS_NATIVE > argv_array_push(out, SHELL_PATH); > #else > argv_array_push(out, "sh"); > #endif > argv_array_push(out, "-c"); > > The issue is, that it is possible to build a fully static native Windows > Git [7]. A Git like this can run on a stock Windows system, with no requirement > on MSYS2 or Cygwin. So it doesnt make sense for Git to be calling `sh`, when a > user may not have or need `sh` on their system. I think that on Native Windows > builds, that the Pager should be called directly, or if a shell must be used, > then make it `cmd.exe` or `powershell.exe`. This makes it impossible to write a configuration that works across platforms. CMD, PowerShell, and sh have entirely different quoting rules and functionality. The user would not be able to specify a pager or editor with arguments portably. In addition, Git supports the EDITOR and VISUAL environment variables for editors and these always, 100% of the time, must be passed to sh to function correctly. It would be a bug if, when I used Windows, these variables were passed to CMD or PowerShell. People also use GIT_EDITOR or GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR for scripting changes to git rebase -i, and these also need to be interpreted in a portable way across systems, or programs will break. Finally, Git needs sh for some commands, like git submodule, git bisect, git filter-branch, and others. While there's an effort to replace a lot of these with C because they don't perform very well on Windows, some of them are highly interactive and unlikely to be used for scripting, so porting them doesn't make a lot of sense. If you really need Git functionality that doesn't rely on sh, you can look into libgit2 and its assorted language wrappers. -- brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204
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