Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/8] git-prompt: support more shells

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2024 08:29:09 -0700

avih <[email-masked]> writes:

>  On Wednesday, July 24, 2024 at 01:50:16 AM GMT+3, brian m. carlson <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>> We explicitly allow `local` in our coding guidelines.
>
> Yeah. I missed the guidelines initially, but I got to the same
> conclusion with git-prompt.sh - to allow only "local" exception.

It is a bit more nuanced than that, though.  Here is what we say:

 - Even though "local" is not part of POSIX, we make heavy use of it
   in our test suite.  We do not use it in scripted Porcelains, and
   hopefully nobody starts using "local" before all shells that matter
   support it (notably, ksh from AT&T Research does not support it yet).

For the purpose of git-prompt, I think it should be OK (without
"local", it is harder, if not impossible, to clobber end-user's
shell variable namespace with various temporaries we need to use
during prompt computation) to declare that we now support shells
other than bash and zsh as long as they are reasonably POSIX and
support "local" that is dynamic.

> That's nice. I did try to check whether it's planned, and request if
> it wasn't, but I didn't find the future plans (but also didn't try
> too hard). Though I think they're still doing bug fixes for the
> forseeable future, which is also great. Looking forward to it.

Do we know what kind of "local" is ksh93 adding?  The same as their
"typeset" that is not dynamic?  That is so different from what others
do and scripts expect to be all that useful, I am afraid.