Re: CVS_USER

[Jim Kingdon]

> It's actually redundant with some of the stuff in my *info patch

Where can I see that patch?

> Jim, has your opinion changed?

Basically, yes.

CGI uses environment variables to pass things to the scripts, and I
guess I don't really see a problem with using environment variables.
Although they seem to be non-portable, they aren't, really.  NT and
VMS have them (or something which the libraries make look the same to
the programs), for example.

The main kludginess associated with having CVS process the shell
commands is that it is unexpected - people don't easily remember just
what substitutions CVS makes or does not make.  And it is one of those
things where you get into quoting hell, where CVS does its processing,
the shell does its, perl/awk/sed/etc (if you call them next) does its,
and so on.  It is worse with "$" than "%", though.  I really regret
that $USER hack I put in (it seemed like a good idea at the time :-)).

Furthermore, last time this came up, everyone seemed to like the
CVS_USER patch.  Or so is my recollection.  I'm a little surprised no
one (except you, Derek) is saying anything this time.  Should I be
asking on devel-cvs?

> You'll have to include a ChangeLog entry and sanity.sh test case.

I did look a bit at writing the latter and it doesn't seem
particularly easy to test.  Not as hard as some of the things which
are already in there, mind you....