Re: [PATCH 4/4] Makefile: introduce SANE_TOOL_PATH for prepending required elements to PATH

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 09:17:08PM -0500, Brandon Casey wrote:

quoted

Some platforms (like SunOS and family) have kept their common binaries at
some historical moment in time, and introduced new binaries with modern
features in a special location like /usr/xpg4/bin or /usr/ucb.  Some of the
features provided by these modern binaries are expected and required by git.
If the featureful binaries are not in the users path, then git could end up
using the less featureful binary and fail.

So provide a mechanism to prepend elements to the users PATH at runtime so
the modern binaries will be found.

My concern with this is that the PATH bleeds over into things we execute
on behalf of the user, like GIT_EDITOR or snippets in git-filter-branch.
So we can end up surprising users that way.

On the other hand, I don't know how big a problem that is in practice. I
feel like any sane Solaris user is going to have xpg4 in their PATH
these days.

I share that feeling, in which case the patch should be no-op.

But I recall the "how about this" patch was done as an illustration of a
possible approach to solve breakage in _tests_; the patch actually does
not touch t/Makefile and would not help tests.