Re: Multiple paths in GIT_EXEC_PATH

Kevin Daudt [off-list ref] writes:

The commit that changed what you described is 1073094f3 (git-sh-setup:
be explicit where to dot-source git-sh-i18n from., 2016-10-29). That
commit claims there were already scripts that assumed GIT_EXEC_PATH is
just a single entry. That commit was included in v2.11.

There was also a recent thread[0] about it that discussed this issue,
where someone stated that indeed treating GIT_EXEC_PATH with the same
semantics as PATH has been broken for a while, but it seems there are no
real plans to fix it.

The variable was never meant to have more than one path concatenated
with ':' from day one.

In C code we've used it as a leading directory path to tack a
command name to form a path to give to exec(3), without any
intention to have it a list of paths, which is split at ':'.
sh-setup was doing "PATH=$GIT_EXEC_PATH:$PATH" without rejecting a
value in GIT_EXEC_PATH with a colon in it but that was merely being
lazy and made it "work" by accident.