Documenting OPAMEDITOR quoting

[emillon]

Hi,

I recently tried to set OPAMEDITOR to something that contains spaces (that was on Windows, "Program Files" was part of the path). This failed because the first "word" was interpreted as a command and the rest as arguments.

This can be worked around by quoting the path (inside the variable). Here's an example on linux:

$ ln -s $(which vim) ~/'v i m'
$ OPAMEDITOR="/home/etienne/v i m" opam pin add testpkg -
Package testpkg does not exist, create as a NEW package? [Y/n] y
[NOTE] No package definition found for testpkg.~dev: please complete the
       template
Press enter to start "/home/etienne/v i m" (this can be customised by setting EDITOR or OPAMEDITOR)... 
sh: 1: /home/etienne/v: not found
$ OPAMEDITOR="'/home/etienne/v i m'" opam pin add testpkg -
Package testpkg does not exist, create as a NEW package? [Y/n] y
[NOTE] No package definition found for testpkg.~dev: please complete the
       template
Press enter to start "'/home/etienne/v i m'" (this can be customised by setting EDITOR or OPAMEDITOR)... 
... vim starts...

I agree that this is the expected behaviour because it's consistent with how git uses EDITOR - in particular it allows passing arguments to the command. Just a note (or a pointer) in the doc for this variable would be useful to users trying to use spaces in the command I think.

Thanks!

[dra27]

Actually, weird though it is, it would be better if opam followed the Windows convention here which is documented in MSDN.

For example:

set EDITOR=C:\Program Files\vim82\vim -y

the "correct" way is to try C:\Program, then C:\Program Files, then C:\Program Files\vim82\vim and, upon finding that C:\Program Files\vim82\vim is a program, run it.

That behaviour should probably be Windows-specific!

[dra27]

Obviously, if the user gives:

set EDITOR="C:\Program Files\vim82\vim" -y

then the first attempt should be C:\Program Files\vim82\vim (also note that single-quotes aren't a thing on Windows)

[dra27]

2.2.0: we should document that OPAMEDITOR is essentially a shell command, and so the command requires shell quoting.