Re: [PATCH 3/3] mingw: document the experimental standard handle redirection

Hi Eric,

On Mon, 30 Oct 2017, Eric Sunshine wrote:

On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 1:10 PM, Johannes Schindelin
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

This feature is still highly experimental and has not even been
contributed to the Git mailing list yet: the feature still needs to be
battle-tested more.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <redacted>
---
+`GIT_REDIRECT_STDIN`::
+`GIT_REDIRECT_STDOUT`::
+`GIT_REDIRECT_STDERR`::
+       (EXPERIMENTAL) Windows-only: allow redirecting the standard
+       input/output/error handles. This is particularly useful in
+       multi-threaded applications where the canonical way to pass
+       standard handles via `CreateProcess()` is not an option because
+       it would require the handles to be marked inheritable (and
+       consequently *every* spawned process would inherit them, possibly
+       blocking regular Git operations). The primary intended use case
+       is to use named pipes for communication.
++
+Two special values are supported: `off` will simply close the
+corresponding standard handle, and if `GIT_REDIRECT_STDERR` is
+`2>&1`, standard error will be redirected to the same handle as
+standard output.

Consistent with the Unixy special-case for '2>&1', I wonder if the
'off' case would be more intuitively stated as '>/dev/null' or just
'/dev/null'...

I feel this is the wrong way round. `>/dev/null` may sound very intuitive
to you, but this feature is Windows only. Guess three times how intuitive
it sounds to Windows developers to write `>/dev/null` if you want to
suppress output...

:0)

Ciao,
Dscho