Re: [PATCH 3/5] run-command: Elaborate execvp error checking

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Frans Klaver wrote:
> Jonathan Nieder wrote:

>> Could you give an example?
>
> The case that triggered me to work on this. I had an incorrect entry
> in my PATH and some aliasing tests failed. The generated command
> output was something like
>
> fatal: script: Access Denied

Sorry for the lack of clarity.  I meant that a (precise) "before and
after" example could make the commit message a lot easier to
understand.

[...]
>> What happens on Windows?
>
> I haven't changed anything on the windows side, so that probably
> sticks to the old behavior.

This was mostly a comment on the change description --- unless I look
at the patch, if I try this out on Windows after reading the changelog
I would end up utterly confused.  For patch 5/5, it also brings up
worries about consistency --- if systems are going to be relying on a
missing #! interpreter being treated differently from a missing script
for the sake of silent_exec_failure, do the same considerations apply
on Windows, too?

Perhaps it's more along the lines of "this is not supposed to happen
in practice, and when it does, humans will find it easier to debug if
we error out hard instead of falling back to the 'if the command does
not exist' behavior (e.g., by trying an alias next)".  In other words,
maybe this is intended as an optional nicety rather than something
scripts would ever rely on.

Jonathan