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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 11, 2013, 07:01 UTC
Message-ID: <7vliavpc4q.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20130211061442.GI15329@elie.Belkin>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 20 quoted lines

> 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.

I am not saying we should have a perfect canned message everybody likes and not have any configurability. I however think we can aim to come up with a message that covers 80% of site administrators who do not care too much and just want git-shell to allow the standard services without giving any custom command.

And for the remaining 20% of those who do not like the canned message but still do not need any custom command, I think it is way suboptimal to force them to create git-shell-commands directory for 47 users his host gives git-shell access to, and copy the "help" script to all of them, only to get a customized message. It would help them quite a lot if you just called /etc/git/shell-disabled or some hook that generates a customized message; then there is no need to add any git-shell-commands directory and a "help" script every time he gets one new user, no?

For those who _do_ want to give customized commands to their users, they can already have "help" script to give a friendly message. It just felt silly to force sites to create the directory only to refuse an access to the "custom commands" feature, especially when the existence of that directory is a signal that the site may want to give its users an acess to that feature.