Re: [PATCH v2] mergetool: support setting path to tool as config var mergetool.<tool>.path

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On Tue, 9 Oct 2007, Steffen Prohaska wrote:

> This commit adds a mechanism to provide absolute paths to the external 
> programs called by 'git mergetool'. A path can be specified in the 
> configuation variable mergetool.<tool>.path. The configuration variable 
> is similar to how we name branches and remotes. It is extensible if we 
> need to specify more details about a tool.

Okay, let's step back a bit.

What does mergetool do?  It calls different merge helpers, each with its 
own convention how to call it.  For example, tkdiff is called either as

		tkdiff -a "$BASE" -o "$path" -- "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"

or as

		tkdiff -o "$path" -- "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"

depending if there is a base or not.  Another example is gvimdiff:

		gvimdiff -f -- "$LOCAL" "$path" "$REMOTE"

which seems not to care if there is a base.

Now, would it not be much better if we had a way to specify the tool and 
the convention indepentently?  Like

merge.tkdiff.path = C:\bla\blub\wish.exe C:\blub\bleh\tkdiff.tcl
merge.tkdiff.options = -o %p -- %l %r
merge.tkdiff.optionsWithBase = -a %b -o %p -- %l %r

and have defaults for the tools we have in git-mergetool.sh _already_?

Ciao,
Dscho