Re: [PATCH] Wait for git diff to finish in git difftool

Junio C Hamano, Thu, Apr 23, 2009 16:51:28 +0200:

Do you think you are in a so minority situation that your "workarounds"
are valuable for nobody else?  Apparently you see value in letting them
finding your patches in the archive, so you do not expect them to be
"nobody else" but rather "a small minority".

Correct, "small minority".

People on minority platforms have smaller number of people in similar
situation to ask help from than people on mainstream platforms, and they
suffer from the minority status of their platforms not only with git but
about many other things.  Worse, their chance of finding solution by
digging the archive is smaller, and they would need to spend a lot more
time, than the people on other platforms.  And you know this a lot better
than I do ;-).

Well, this particular minority is used to have marginal levels of
technical support and .

For example, I do not think conversion from Perl exec() to Perl system()
is worsening the code in any way in difftool.  Sure, it won't *improve*
things for general majority of people, but as long as it does not hurt
people (that includes me and others who pay maintenance cost), I do not
think we should just bury the patch in archive or in your laptop.

Isn't it clearly marked in the archives with the keywords most often
associated with the platform? (they may seem a little... unprintable)

Still, you are, as usual, right. Especially regarding this particular case.

I'll add this comment regarding use of system in the case where exec
is right choice on all accounts and resend the patch:

    # ActiveState Perl for Win32 does not implement POSIX semantics of
    # exec* system call. It just spawns the given executable and finishes
    # the starting program, exiting with code 0.
    # system will at least catch the errors in returned by git diff,
    # allowing the caller of git difftool better handling of failures.