Re: [PATCH v2 2/3] Optionally skip linking/copying the built-ins

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 24, 2020, 19:02 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqmu2j50kk.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <166bd0d8fb699132569aff855de59c7607581adf.1598283480.git.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

"Johannes Schindelin via GitGitGadget" <gitgitgadget@gmail.com> writes:

> While Git still supports the dashed form (by hard-linking the `git`
> executable to the dashed name in `libexec/git-core/`), in practice, it
> is probably almost irrelevant.

It is irrelevant when you have to say "probably" without facts, and this paragraph is not necessary to justify this option. I'd omit it.

We do care about keeping people's scripts working (even if they were written before Windows folks started using Git---those people who started using Git before that still exist ;-).

Show 9 quoted lines

> In fact, some platforms (such as Windows) only started gaining
> meaningful Git support _after_ the dashed form was deprecated, and
> therefore one would expect that all this hard-linking is unnecessary on
> those platforms.
> 
> In addition to that, some programs that are regularly used to assess
> disk usage fail to realize that those are hard-links, and heavily
> overcount disk usage. Most notably, this was the case with Windows
> Explorer up until the last couple of Windows 10 versions.

However, the above two paragraphs I would suggest to keep, as they do matter---it is a good justification to have this configurable. Windows folks won't be able to copy and use POSIX shell scripts written by folks before the Windows port of Git was started to become widely used anyway.