git on Solaris?

I'm investigating moving to git for our development, but I'm having difficulty getting a functional version on Solaris. I've looked through a lot of web pages, and seen a discussion of some of the problems a few years ago, and I see that at least some of the changes proposed then (moving from shell scripts to c) have been implemented.

However, it's by no means straightforward to compile git on solaris, no one seems to provide a compiled version (eg, sunfreeware.com), and I haven't found any clear cookbook description of how to compile, test and install git on the solaris (10) platform.

So my questions are:

* Is there a set of instructions for Solaris somewhere that I've missed?

* Is anyone actually using git on Solaris?

  Right now, it appears that gnu make and bash are both required to  
make git, and perhaps a bunch
  of other gnu utilities.

* Once made, do the git scripts require gnu utilities to work  
properly?  I'm a bit leery of putting the
     GNU utilities ahead of the solaris ones in my path (and everyone  
elses).

Thanks, -- danq

Daniel Quinlan <danq@brtt.com> wrote:

Yes.  I run it on Solaris 9 and on Solaris 10, SPARC editions anyway.
I haven't personally tested it on the x86 Solaris version yet but
I don't expect any major differences from the SPARC edition.
 

At least GNU make is required to compile Git. This is available pretty readily, and also builds fairly easy out of the box as source code if (for some reason) you cannot install a version from sunfreeware.com. Some little voice in the back of my head thinks it may also be available out of the box on Solaris 10 but I'm not sure.

Either the GNU utilties or /usr/xpg4/bin needs to be early in your PATH so that Git can pick up tools from there. I think I'm actually building Git with a config.mak along the lines of:

	$ cat - >config.mak
	SHELL=/usr/xpg4/bin/sh
	SHELL_PATH=$(SHELL)
	^D

and then ensuring users have /usr/xpg4/bin very early in their PATH environment variable.

It does manage to build with both gcc and the Solaris workshop compilers, so about the only GNU program really necessary to get git built is GNU make. Of course I'm only talking about the really core functionality; tools like git-p4, git-svn, gitk, git-gui will require support beyond that (Python, Perl SVN bindings, Tcl/Tk...).

Daniel Quinlan <danq <at> brtt.com> writes:

I am using Git on OpenSolaris (a Joyent accelerator). I found the process of compiling Git on Solaris impossible to figure out myself as well. The solution I found lay in installing Git from a package that Joyent provides which has been working well for me deploying Rails apps to Joyent using Capistrano and Git.

I did the following:

On my accelerator I downloaded this entire package dir to my local home dir:

http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/2007Q3/All/

I copied the whole thing recursively with this command:

wget -q -r -nc http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/2007Q3/All/

Then:

sudo /opt/local/sbin/pkg_add \ ~/pkgsrc.joyent.com/2007Q3/All/scmgit-1.5.3.2.tgz

You might be able to deduce what was done to get it working by digging into the scmgit package file.

Here is a wiki page with instructions for compiling Git on solaris, but I could not get them to work reliably (I could compile but tests would not pass).

http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=145354

I too would love to find a way to do a simple compile and install similar to what I do on OS X.

Glenn