Re: [PATCH] git-gui - use git-hook, honor core.hooksPath

From: Mark Levedahl <mlevedahl@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 20, 2023, 15:30 UTC
Message-ID: <573c6dc5-2102-cb65-8f71-dea37fff0c9b@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <mafs01qetq9kk.fsf@yadavpratyush.com>

On 9/20/23 09:05, Pratyush Yadav wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> In the past, git-gui has tried to keep backward compatibility with all
> versions of Git, not just the latest ones. v2.36 is relatively new and
> this code would not work for anyone using an older version of Git.
>
> I have largely followed this practice for all the code I have written
> but I am not sure if it is a good idea to insist on it -- especially if
> it would end up adding some more complexity. I would be interested to
> hear what other people think about this.
>

I am not aware of any distribution (Linux, g4w, Mac) shipping anything except the git-gui in Junio's tree, which is specific to the git-core version, and the git-gui packages require (or are a part of) the same version git-core package: no cross-version compatibility of git components is assumed. Certainly, folks rolling their own can pull from upstream git-gui, but they take the risk of incompatibility with an outdated git. Other tools in Junio's tree have already made the switch to git-hook (send-email, git-p4) even though they are usually packaged separately from git-core, but also version locked to matching git-core.

Updating git-gui's hook execution to match git internals would be more complex than what I implemented or what was there before. For instance, I never looked at what git-hook's g4w compatibility code uses to test if a hook is present and executable, it wouldn't surprise me to find git-gui was missing something there, but who wants to bother? Also, the commit language surrounding addition of git-hook is strongly suggestive of other changes in configuration coming, meaning more changes to hook execution code would be needed that are avoided by using git-hook. Note: I have one more patch to send, removing yet another work-around for early Cygwin tcl/tk, as more evidence of how many years it takes to clean some of this stuff out and the difficulty of keeping git-gui up to date.

I had considered the above when creating the patch, and I believe what I did is the right approach.

Mark