Re: silent_exec_failure when calling gpg

John Passaro [off-list ref] writes:

I've noticed that in v2.19.1, when using git to pretty print
information about the signature, if git cannot find gpg (e.g. "git
config gpg.program nogpg"), it prints an error to stderr:

$ git show -s --pretty=%G?
fatal: cannot run nogpg: No such file or directory
N

When I build from master, that no longer happens:

$ ../git/git show -s --pretty=%G?
N

Is this intentional behavior, i.e. something I can count on being the
case in future releases? Or should I treat this as a bug report?

In general, behaviour of Porcelain commands like "git show" can and
will be changed to match interactive use by humans, and should never
be relied on in your scripts.

Having said that, I think we did not mean to kill the diagnositic
message.

This behavior makes sense in a lot of ways. If you're interested in
verifying commit signatures, it's hard to imagine needing a reminder
to install the program it depends on (though the error might help you
identify bad configuration for "gpg.program").

Quite the contrary, from a single "N", you cannot immediately tell
if the commit is not signed, if your GPG is misconfigured, or if you
have a stray gpg.program that points at nowhere.

I think the uninteded behaviour change was in 17809a98 ("Merge
branch 'jk/run-command-notdot'", 2018-10-30).

Thanks for a report.