RE: [Patch 1/3] connect.c: add nonstopssh variant to the sshVariant set.

On June 4, 2021 3:52 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

"Randall S. Becker" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

The primary
problem is supplying -S $ZSSH0 on the command line causes $ZSSH0 to be
resolved as a shell variable. It is not.

I think we've heard that one before, and the whole thing sounds like you are saying that a command line

   $ cmd $ZSSH0

expects ZSSH0 to be a variable and tries to interpolate its value before passing it to "cmd" while you want "cmd" to see a literal

string that

begins with a dollar sign.

And the standard solution to that problem obviously is to tell the shell that the dollar-sign is not a reference to a variable by

quoting, by

using any variant of e.g.

   $ cmd \$ZSSH0
   $ cmd '$ZSSH0'
   $ cmd "\$ZSSH0"

I'm going to have to retest this, but, when I last tried this, admittedly around git 2.0, what happened was that one level of
escaping the $ worked for ls-remote, but we needed two levels for upload-pack which seemed to have two shells processing the
command. I might be wrong about the specifics (been 4 years), but there was an inconsistency with the number of required escapes.
The single quote did not work for upload-pack at the time. It is entirely possible that the second level indirection happened
because the execution of the sshoss command itself cross over a platform boundary between the POSIX and non-POSIX file systems (it
lives in the non-POSIX side).

As far as I can tell, the code in connect.c that spawns ssh via GIT_SSH_COMMAND uses the pretty vanilla run_command() interface,

and

that ought to be capable of producing such a command line, so I am lost as to where the need to have special case comes from.

"cmd" here may be "ssh" but run_command() should not care what exact command is being invoked.  I am puzzled why a simple quoting
like the following cannot be adjusted for this particular case, for
example:

   $ cat >>.git/config <<\EOF
   [alias]
cmdtest0 = "!echo ..\\$ZSSH0.."
cmdtest1 = "!echo ..$ZSSH0.."
   EOF
   $ ZSSH0=foo git cmdtest0
   ..$ZSSH0..
   $ ZSSH0=foo git cmdtest1
   ..foo..

The multi-level resolution that I experienced is not covered in this situation. Still going to investigate this. I'm working on a
different approach to extend my wrapper script to parse out the port, to supply to sshoss, which is not complaint with the standard
ssh. If I have to stick with that script, there's no point going further on this variant.