What's cooking in git.git

I have queued the following for the maintenance branches.

For both 1.0.X and 1.1.X series:

 - update-index: work with c-quoted name
 - show-branch: handle [] globs as well.
 - name-rev: do not omit leading components of ref name.

For 1.1.X series only:

 - Add git-describe to .gitignore.
 - describe: do not silently ignore indescribable commits

I plan to do 1.0.10 [*1*] and 1.1.2 sometime this weekend, along with some other fixes that would appear until then.

On the development front, I have these in the proposed updates branch:

 - Exec git programs without using PATH (Michal Ostrowski).

   This has been discussed for the last couple of days on the
   list.  I think C side is ready to go in, but I'd like to
   decide what to do on the scripting side before merging it
   into the master branch.

 - Disable USE_SYMLINK_HEAD by default (Pavel Roskin).

   This has been on hold for almost two months -- forever in git
   timescale.

   One offender that could have been broken by this change was
   fixed recently (gitweb), so this can go in anytime now.  Do
   people still care about it?  The argument for the change when
   it was proposed was "then we only have to worry about one
   format of .git/HEAD, not two", and it still is a valid
   argument from Porcelain writers' point of view.  To be
   honest, since I do not do Porcelain, I am neutral about it.

 - convert-packs: futureproofing.
 - Require packfiles to follow the naming convention (preparation).

   These two I have been holding for a while.  I would
   eventually like to force people to rename the packfiles
   created by GIT older than v0.99.9 which has unverifiable
   hexadecimal string in their names and these are the first
   two baby steps toward that goal.  If people object to the
   idea of verifiable packname in general, please raise hand,
   and I may be talked into shelving the whole thing.

 - Documentation: show-branch.
 - show-branch: always include the current branch
 - show-branch: make --topo-order noop and default.
 - show-branch: make the current branch stand out.

   Here are mostly usability updates.

I'll send out some of the above patches to the list separately for discussion and review.

[Footnote]

*1* 1.0.X series maintenance can largely be ignored by general public, since I do not see any reason to stick to 1.0.X series. 1.1.X series does not have any backward incompatibility issues as far as I know. I am doing 1.0.X series primarily as a practice for myself, and to experiment with a maintainer workflow like this:

 - "fixo/1.0" topic branch queues fixes applicable for 1.0
   series *and* *later* maintenance series.

 - "fix" topic branch queues fixes applicable only for the
   current maintenance series.

 - "mainto/1.0" branch is used to cut releases for the 1.0.X
   maintenance series from.  This pulls from "fixo/1.0" topic
   branch.

 - "maint" branch is used to cut releases for the current
   maintenance series from.  This pulls from both "fix" topic
   branch and "mainto/*" topic branches.

With this setup, I can first merge "fixo/1.0" to "mainto/1.0", and then merge "mainto/1.0" and "fix" branches to "maint", to come up with something like this:

    $ git show-branch fix fixo/* maint mainto/*
    ! [fix] describe: do not silently ignore indescribable commits
     ! [fixo/1.0] name-rev: do not omit leading components of ref name.
      * [maint] GIT 1.1.2 (not really -- just a demonstration)
       ! [mainto/1.0] GIT 1.0.10 (not really -- just a demonstration)
    ----
      *  [maint] GIT 1.1.2 (not really -- just a demonstration)
    + *  [fix] describe: do not silently ignore indescribable commits
    + *  [fix^] Add git-describe to .gitignore.
      *  [maint^] Merge fixes up to GIT 1.0.10 (not really)
      *+ [mainto/1.0] GIT 1.0.10 (not really -- just a demonstration)
     +*+ [fixo/1.0] name-rev: do not omit leading components of ref name.
     +*+ [fixo/1.0^] update-index: work with c-quoted name
      *+ [mainto/1.0^] GIT 1.0.9
      *  [maint~2] GIT 1.1.1
     +*+ [fixo/1.0~2] glossary: explain "master" and "origin"
    + *  [maint~3] GIT-VERSION-GEN: detect dirty tree and mark the ver...
    + *  [maint~4] For release tarballs, include the proper version
    + *  [maint~5] GIT 1.1.0
    + *+ [mainto/1.0~2] GIT 1.0.8
    ++*+ [fixo/1.0~3] mailsplit: allow empty input from stdin

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> writes:

I've done a minor fix in the Makefile (things were installed in the wrong way around --- $bindir should hold git and gitk and $gitexecdir should hold the rest), and ran a brief test after installing things with gitexecdir set to /usr/lib/git-core/x. gitk needs to be taught to use git --exec-path upfront to set its own PATH, but other than that, everything looks peachy.

About prepending to/appending to/not touching PATH, my current thinking is that prepending is the way to go. The best rationale so far I have heard against mucking with PATH was "/home/mo/bin/diff vs /usr/bin/diff" issue, but I do not find this to be so convincing in practice. This "use my diff not system diff" is done most often when system diff is not GNU enough, but on such a machine git will not be installed under /usr/bin anyway (after all git prefers GNU diff).

And this becomes truly a non-issue when you point $gitexecdir at a separate location that holds *only* git stuff. Everybody will find the matching version of git that way, and when looking for "diff", it will be found from one of the directories in the rest of the PATH, not from $gitexecdir.

So unless there is an objection, this will graduate into the "master" branch over the weekend.

What happens if gitexecdir != bindir?

As long as the user invokes "git foo" from the command line, not "git-foo", everything should work fine, and once gitk is updated, binary distributions could ship git with only git and gitk in /usr/bin and others in /usr/lib/git-core/tools, or something like that.

I will _not_ change the default gitexecdir in my Makefile nor change the spec file, so RPM binary from kernel.org will still have everything in /usr/bin for now.

Somebody needs to audit how ready popular Porcelains are, for at least Cogito, stgit, gitweb and qgit and feed patches to respective authors as necessary. I haven't looked into any of them about this issue. The rules are:

    (1) you can assume "git" is available on PATH;

    (2) you should be safe if you do not use "git-foo" form;

    (3) you can run

        PATH="$(git --exec-path):$PATH"; export PATH

        once at the beginning of your program and use "git-foo"
        form.

Volunteers?

Dear diary, on Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 01:04:41AM CET, I got a letter where Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> said that...

Yes, I'd still be pleased to see this. Cogito should be ready for this for long enough, as far as I'm concerned.