Re: [PATCH v12 3/5] bugreport: gather git version and build info

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 6, 2020, 23:17 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqeet0urts.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20200406224526.256074-4-emilyshaffer@google.com>

Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com> writes:

> It's not ideal to directly call 'git version --build-options' because
> that output goes to stdout. Instead, wrap the version string in a helper
> within help.[ch] library, and call that helper from within the bugreport
> library.

This means that "git-bugreport" that can be a different binary from say "git-remote-curl" (or "git-version" for that matter) would still report whatever version string that was compiled into "bugreport".

Reporting the version of "bugreport" is *not* useless, and what this step adds to the report is good.

But the version number of "bugreport" may not have much to do with the binary the end user is having trouble with, so we'd also want the version of the main part of "git", and other standalone "git" subprograms like "git-remote-curl", reported separately, probably together with $PATH, $GIT_EXEC_PATH and what appears in the directories listed on these environment variables.

If "git version --build-options" writes to its standard output stream, that is a good thing, as it makes it easy to spawn and read what it says via the run_command() API, and there is one less thing to worry about (it would be a bit more cumbersome if the output goes to the standard error stream).

As "git-remote-curl" would also be a separate binary, we'd have to use the same technique to report version number (and perhaps curl's library version and its configuration?), perhaps by teaching the subcommand a new option to dump such details to its standard output.

Using the same technique to report the version about the "git" itself would be consistent thing to do, as a preparation for future steps that reports the details about "git-remote-curl".

Thanks.