On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 19:56 -0700, Greg Stein wrote:
> Woah...
>
> I don't support this change. One of svn's design points when we first
> started was "no environment variables". Yes, we have some, but each
> was considered carefully before adding. The reason to avoid
> environment variables is that they subtly alter the operation of the
> software. If you have/don't-have the variable defined, then the code
> acts quite differently.
Heh. I support the position of "no environment variables", but it's
harder than that to explain the reason. (The reader who needs convincing
responds to the above with, "Well, duh, of course that's what they do.
Just like other kinds of configuration settings. That's the whole
point!") The reasons why an environment variable is not good for this
kind of setting have to do with the disconnect between where the
settings are configured (in some arbitrary shell script) and where
they're used (in Subversion), the ephemeral nature of the "environment",
e.g. it changes when you enter or leave a sub-shell, and things like
that.
Arfrever, if there are reasons why it is much better to allow this to be
configured by an env var, please say. (Being convenient for testing is
not a sufficient reason.)
- Julian
> Our goal was to make Subversion's operation as
> obvious and straight-forward as possible, and one of the ways to that
> was to minimize the use of environment variables.
>
> In this case, a user can set a configuration value, so there is no
> need for an environment variable.
>
> -g
>
> On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 6:31 PM, <arfrever_at_tigris.org> wrote:
> > Author: arfrever
> > Date: Sun Oct 19 18:31:27 2008
> > New Revision: 33767
> >
> > Log:
> > Support SVN_HTTP_LIBRARY environment variable for specifying which HTTP library
> > should be used.
> >
> > * subversion/libsvn_ra/ra_loader.c
> > (svn_ra_open3): Use SVN_HTTP_LIBRARY environment variable if it exists.
> > Otherwise use http-library configuration option.
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Received on 2008-10-20 12:45:43 CEST