> It's also hard to inspect; the output of "env" tends to be somewhat long, and you don't know which the program will pick up on. Flags are much clearer and more explicit.

I don't think I disagree with your post, but this particular point seems to be trivially solved by prefixing the variable name with the program name?

IOW: `env | grep '^GIT_'` to see what you're passing to `git`.