Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 0.99.9g

From: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Date: Nov 10, 2005, 17:13 UTC
Message-ID: <43737F9E.60703@zytor.com>
In-Reply-To: <43730E39.6030601@pobox.com>

Jeff Garzik wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> 
>> Oh, and we will not be moving things out of /usr/bin/ during 1.0
>> timeframe.
> 
> 
> :(  bummer.  I do like the elegance of having /usr/bin/git executing 
> stuff out of /usr/libexec/git.
> 
> /usr/libexec/git also makes it IMO cleaner when integrating git plugins 
> from third parties (rpm -Uvh git-newfeature), because you don't have to 
> worry about the /usr/bin namespace.
>

It's nice in concept, but I think there are a lot of reasons why this is a bad idea:

- "man" doesn't handle it.  It would be another thing if "man" could be 
taught to understand commands like "man cvs checkout" or "man git fetch".

- There is no general way to teach shells etc about it, for tab 
completion etc.

- Makes it harder (but not impossible) to run git from a build directory 
without installing it first.

In comparison, the issue of clutter in /usr/bin is actually a pretty small issue, especially with htree. Most vendors have gone back to putting everything into /usr/bin since all variants that involve splitting it up seem to be more of a loss than a gain.

	-hpa