Re: [PATCH 7/8] Makefile: introduce SANE_TOOL_PATH for prepending required elements to PATH

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 08:39:50AM -0500, Brandon Casey wrote:

> > Am I crazy for not having EDITOR=vim instead of EDITOR=vi? Perhaps. But
> > I wanted to point out that tweaking the PATH behind the user's back does
> > cause surprises in the real world.
> 
> Good points.  I'm fine with dropping this patch, especially when it causes
> problems for a real Solaris user, which I'm not.

Let me point out that I'm also not a real Solaris user. These days all I
use it for is test-compiling git. So you can take my report with a grain
of salt.

> I don't like that git has a dependency on the user's PATH being set
> correctly though.  That's why I liked the patch.  I guess I could modify
> all the uses of sed and friends to look like $SED and then set SED to
> /usr/xpg4/bin/sed on Solaris.  It doesn't sound like that is necessary
> in practice though.

Yeah, I think requiring the user's PATH to be set correctly and tweaking
the PATH behind the user's back are both unsatisfactory solutions. Using
$SED everywhere solves both problems, but would probably be quite
annoying to maintain. So I guess it is a matter of picking our poison.

-Peff