From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2013 06:14:43 GMT
Subject: Re: [RFC/PATCH] shell: allow 'help' command to disable interactive shell
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:

>>>               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