On 8/7/17, Junio C Hamano <gits...@pobox.com> wrote: > Just to avoid possible confusion, the above is not to say "once it > is decided, you are not allowed to bring fresh arguments to the > discussion". As Peff said [*2*] in that old discussion thread, the > circumstances may have changed over 9 years, and it may benefit to > revisit some old decisions. > > So in that sense, I do not mind somebody makes a fresh proposal, > which would probably be similar to what I did back then in [*3*], > which is at the beginning of that old thread. But I do not think I > would be doing so myself, and I suspect that I would not be very > supportive for such a proposal, because my gut feeling is that the > upside is not big enough compared to downsides. > > The obvious upside is that you do not have to have many built-in > commands on the filesystem, either as a hardlink, a copy, or a > symbolic link. But we will be breaking people's scripts by breaking > the 11-year old promise that we will keep their "git-foo" working as > long as they prepend $GIT_EXEC_PATH to their $PATH we we did so. > Another downside is that we now will expose which subcommands are > built-in and which are not, which is unnecessarily implementation > detail we'd want end-users to rely on. > > The "'git co' may stop working" I mentioned in my previous message > is not counted as a downside---if the upside is large enough, I > think that "we respawn git-foo as dashed built-in when running an > alias that expands to 'foo'" can be fixed to respawn "git foo" > instead of "git-foo". But there may be other downside that we may > not be able to fix, and I suspect that "we'd be breaking the 11-year > old promise" is something we would not be able to fix. That is why > I doubt that I would be advocating the removal of "git-foo" from the > filesystem myself.
Thanks for the history and explanation, Junio. I agree with your analysis. I didn't know that git aliases invoke the `git-foo` path for built-ins (I don't use them much myself, so didn't notice). I also didn't know that it was supported to add GIT_EXEC_DIR to your PATH to be able to call `git-foo`. I generally think of /libexec as implementation-specific executables that a tool may call internally (in that sense, whether or not the commands are built-ins would remain an implementation-detail). However, I still think the patch should be applied for self-consistency at least (git-submodule.sh currently calls both `git rev-parse` and `git-rev-parse`). Also, based on Johannes' reply, it may still be useful for git-for-windows. > > [References] > > *1* > https://public-inbox.org/git/alpine.lfd.1.10.0808261114070.3...@nehalem.linux-foundation.org/ > > *2* > https://public-inbox.org/git/20080826145719.gb5...@coredump.intra.peff.net/ > > *3* https://public-inbox.org/git/7vprnzt7d5....@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org/
