Re: [RFC] Renaming environment variables.

[Petr Baudis <pasky@ucw.cz>]

Dear diary, on Mon, May 09, 2005 at 10:05:00PM CEST, I got a letter
where Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> told me that...
>  - Renames the following environment variables:
> 
>     New name                Old Name
> 
>     GIT_AUTHOR_DATE         AUTHOR_DATE
>     GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL        AUTHOR_EMAIL
>     GIT_AUTHOR_NAME         AUTHOR_NAME
>     GIT_COMMIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL COMMIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL
>     GIT_COMMIT_AUTHOR_NAME  COMMIT_AUTHOR_NAME
>     GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECTS   SHA1_FILE_DIRECTORIES
>     GIT_OBJECTS             SHA1_FILE_DIRECTORY

Could I please have s/COMMIT_AUTHOR/COMMITTER/ and
s/OBJECTS/(OBJDIR|OBJECT_DIR)/?

> The transition plan is as follows:
> 
>  - We will keep the backward compatibility list used by gitenv()
>    for now, so the current scripts and user environments
>    continue to work as before.  The users will get warnings when
>    they have old name but not new name in their environment to
>    the stderr.
> 
>  - The Porcelain layers should start using new names.  However,
>    just in case it ends up calling old Plumbing layer
>    implementation, they should also export old names, taking
>    values from the corresponding new names, during the
>    transition period.

(Cogito needs its own git-merge-cache so that the merge goes properly
anyway, and it already (or still) carries its Git around, so I think
it's not applicable to it. Yes, I want and plan to start publishing the
Git changes, I'm already making some steps for that and I hope I have
something to show by tomorrow.)

>  - After a couple of weeks or so, we would drop the
>    compatibility support and drop gitenv().  Revert the callers
>    to directly call getenv() but keep using the new names.
> 
>    The last part is probably optional and the transition
>    duration needs to be set to a reasonable value.

Yes, I think couple of weeks is too long. :-) I'd say one or two
releases is enough.

> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/gitenv.c

Pretty please, add copyright notices at the top of files.

> +char *gitenv_bc(const char *e)
> +{
> +	int first, last;
> +	char *val = getenv(e);
> +	if (val)
> +		/* inefficient.  caller should use gitenv() not gitenv_bc() */
> +		return val;

Can this ever happen? If doing it at all, I'd expect gitenv_bc() to
rather freak out and die(), the caller is broken.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog. -- Steve Taylor