Re: git-send-email: smtpserver in $HOME

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

Still, it seems a bit unusual for an executed program to handle tilde
like this. The usual mechanism is for us to run it with the shell and
expect to find it in $PATH.

Yes, the user should be able to deal with the $PATH.

It looks like there's some weirdness here, though; $smtp_server may be a
hostname, and it looks like we use "/" to distinguish a file path. I
wonder if allowing "!my-sendmail" would be more consistent with other
parts of Git (not to mention more flexible).

I am not sure '!' prefix fits well here.

When cloning from something (that is not yet known as an entity that
we must go over the network), we do an equivalent of "test -f" (for
bundles) and "test -d" (for local repositories), and I think the use
of "does it refer to a local file" here matches it as a precedent.

I do find it sloppy that the check uses file_name_is_absolute() that
only checks the shape of the string, without seeing if it actually
exists and is an executable file, though.

Thanks.