Re: git-instaweb should 'just work' on Mac OS X

> On May 10, 2008, at 3:49 PM, Kevin Ballard wrote:
>
>> On May 10, 2008, at 2:27 PM, nathan spindel wrote:
>>
>>> I've investigated what it would take for git-instaweb to 'just  
>>> work' on
>>> Mac OS X 10.5 when running the command with no arguments. This  
>>> would be
>>> of benefit to many Mac git users since they shouldn't be expected to
>>> troubleshoot this problem. Here are the current issues at play:
>>>
>>> - lighttpd does not come with Mac OS X by default, so git-instaweb
>>> currently exits with "lighttpd not found...".
>>>
>>> - git-instaweb doesn't fallback to using other web servers on the  
>>> system
>>> if the default command doesn't exist.
>>>
>>> - Mac OS X does come with webrick and 'git-instaweb -d webrick'  
>>> _does_ just
>>> work. It's probably slower than Apache though (?).
>>>
>>> - Mac OS X also comes with mongrel, which is a great alternative,  
>>> but
>>> git-instaweb doesn't support it.
>>>
>>> - Mac OS X's Apache installation is different than what git-instaweb
>>> expects in a couple areas:
>>> - the Apache binary is called 'httpd', not 'apache2', and git- 
>>> instaweb
>>>   only looks for the latter.
>>> - the modules on Mac OS X live in /usr/libexec/apache2 but by  
>>> default
>>>   git-instaweb looks for /usr/lib/apache2/modules.
>>> - Apache attempts to create its 'accept serialization lock file' at
>>>   /private/var/run/ but that path is only writeable by root (a  
>>> workaround
>>>   is to add a LockFile directive to the conf file that places it
>>>   in $fqgitdir/gitweb/tmp).
>>>
>>> I'm interested in fixing this to make the experience smoother for  
>>> Mac users.
>>> What is the community's preferred avenue of fixing this?
>>
>> If I were to fix this, I'd suggest making apache2 work properly. I  
>> patched the git-svn tests to do this a while back, so you could  
>> look at what's I did there (3644da7214).
>
> Thanks Kevin. Your patch is similar to how I imagined fixing apache2.
>
> Would you suggest fixing the other non-starter issue (git-instaweb  
> doesn't fallback to other daemons if the default doesn't exist)?  Or  
> maybe changing the default to apache2 on Mac OS X installs (that  
> seems like a poorer fix)?