Re: [PATCH 3/3] Makefile: optionally symlink libexec/git-core binaries to bin/git

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Mar 19, 2018, 11:34 UTC
Message-ID: <nycvar.QRO.7.76.6.1803191228240.55@ZVAVAG-6OXH6DA.rhebcr.pbec.zvpebfbsg.pbz>
In-Reply-To: <87efkkdwcv.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

Hi Ævar,

On Fri, 16 Mar 2018, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> 
> On Fri, Mar 16 2018, Johannes Schindelin jotted:
> 
> > On Thu, 15 Mar 2018, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> >> We do end up still using the dashed form for certain things, but they
> >> are already special-cased (ie things like "git-receive-pack" and
> >> "git-shell" that very much get executed directly, and for fundamental
> >> reasons).
> >
> > Please do elaborate.
> 
> If you were to set set "/bin/git shell" in /etc/password it would not do
> the right thing as far as I know. Is that a shell name with a space in
> it, or the "shell" argument to /bin/git?

True. And `git-shell` is not a builtin, so it does not even matter with regards to this discussion.

> There's also the fully dashed forms of stuff like git-receive-pack is
> part of the over-ssh convention, i.e.:
> 
>     ssh <host> git-upload-pack ...

Even if upload-pack is not a builtin (and thus still has to be its own executable), receive-pack *is*, so this does affect our current discussion.

This is a real problem. And it is our own darned fault because we let an implementation detail bleed into a protocol. We could have designed that a lot better.

Of course we should fix this, though. There is literally no good reason that I can think of why we should not change this to `ssh <host> git upload-pack ...` (of course with an insanely long deprecation period).

Ciao, Dscho