Re: [PATCH] add -C[NUM] to git-am

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

"Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@mellanox.co.il> writes:

> BTW, Junio, why is it that git-rebase calls "git am" and not "git-am"?

Not commenting on the patch itself yet in this message, but a
quick note on the above point.

At some point after 1.5.0 we might want to audit the scripts and
make sure we can still run with $(gitexecdir) set to somewhere
outside of the end user's $PATH.

In such a setting, an end user would start "git rebase" (or
whatever git program) because "git-rebase" will not be on her
$PATH.  The git wrapper would do the GIT_EXEC_PATH magic before
invoking "git-rebase", so even the call to "am" is made in
"git-am" form from our script, it will work correctly.

So in that sense, they are equivalent and does not matter from
correctness point of view. It used to matter cycle-wise because
the "git potty" was a shell script, but I do not think it
matters anymore.

Once we make sure we still correctly support $(gitexecdir) that
is different from $(bindir), we may want to update all the
invocation of "git foo" our scripts make to "git-foo", for a
different reason.

Once in-tree scripts and commands that invoke git stuff always
with git-foo syntax, I think we _could_ allow aliasing built-in
command with something else.  For example, we could allow
"[alias] foo = git-foo --my-favorite-flag" in the configuration
file and let the user say "git foo" from the command line to
mean "$GIT_EXEC_PATH/git-foo --my-favorite-flag", while not
affecting the uses of "git-foo" in *our* scripts.

I do not think we would want to change the default to use
separate bindir and gitexecdir, but the intent has always been
that we should make it easier to do if some distro wanted to 
package with gitexecdir set to /usr/libexec/git.