Re: [PATCH] Makefile: check that tcl/tk is installed

From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 20, 2017, 17:25 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD3LhR+FRMM--SQVZ_m2-g2w-WkmmFX7aqrp9S5A9vi1ow@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20171117220210.6xqi26mabbyvxc2m@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 11:02 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

>
> I'm actually tempted to say that we should not be building the tcl parts
> by default. IOW, instead of NO_TCLTK we should have USE_TCLTK. That
> would also require an adjustment by package builders, but it would
> hopefully be a really obvious one. And once the user has told our
> Makefile that they definitely want to build the tcl parts, we'd
> presumably just trust that the tcl path they give us is sane.
>
> But it's possible I'm underestimating how many people actually use the
> tcl scripts. Certainly I don't, and git-gui seems fairly primitive to me
> these days compared to 3rd party tools. But then I don't use any of them
> either. ;)

As I wrote in the version 2 of the patch (yeah I forgot to mark it as version 2) I agree that removing NO_TCLTK while introducing USE_TCLTK and not building git-gui and gitk by default is simpler and probably the right direction for the future, but I think it might be too big a change for now or until the next major release (Git 3.0.0).

Especially it can cause issues to people who were building and installing gitk and git-gui because they use it. They might not realize that USE_TCLTK has been introduced and still think that they are building and installing the newest versions, when in fact they would not and keep using old versions.