Re: [PATCH] mergetool: support absolute paths to tools by git config merge.<tool>path

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 11:22:40PM +0200, Steffen Prohaska wrote:
> This commit adds a mechanism to provide absolute paths to the
> commands called by 'git mergetool'. A path can be specified
> in the configuation variable merge.<toolname>path.

This patch doesn't work the config file doesn't specify an explicit
mergetool via merge.tool.   The reason for that is this loop:

    for i in $merge_tool_candidates; do
        if test $i = emerge ; then
            cmd=emacs
        else
            cmd=$i
        fi
        if type $cmd > /dev/null 2>&1; then
            merge_tool=$i
            break
        fi
    done

is only checking to see if $cmd is in the path; it's not looking up
the merge.<toolname>path variable in this loop.

I guess the other question is whether we would be better off simply
telling the user to specify an absolute pathname in merge.tool, and
then having git-mergetool strip off the directory path via basename,
and then on window systems, stripping off the .EXE or .COM suffix, and
then downcasing the name so that something like "C:\Program
Files\ECMerge\ECMerge.exe" gets translated to "ecmerge".  Would I be
right in guessing that the reason why you used merge.<toolname>path
approach was to avoid this messy headache?

					- Ted