Re: [RFC/PATCH] shell: allow 'help' command to disable interactive shell

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 11, 2013, 06:14 UTC
Message-ID: <20130211061442.GI15329@elie.Belkin>
In-Reply-To: <7vpq07pgpy.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
>> Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

>>>               Are you shooting for customizability?
>>
>> Yes, and the ability to generate the message dynamically.
>
> Hmph, if that is the case, wouldn't it be a better direction to give
> a better help for majority of the case where git-shell is used as
> the login shell to allow push and fetch but not for interactive
> access at all?
>
> The first step in that direction may be to give a better canned
> message, followed by a mechanism (perhaps a hook) that lets a
> message customized for the site's needs, no?

The trouble is that I can't imagine a canned message that everyone will like. (For example, I quite dislike the current one.) That's exactly the situation in which some configurability is helpful.

Some configurability is nice for other situations, anyway. For example, sites serving a multilingual audience may want the message to vary based on the user's language (or even source IP). The message can include a list of available repositories or extra information that changes over time. And so on.

Hope that helps, Jonathan