git-core vs git package on ubuntu

Mario Michael Krell· Jan 25, 2013, 13:50 UTC · lore

Dear git developers,

In your documentation you say, that git should be installed on Unix using

apt-get install git-core

Unfortunately it tells the user, that this package is obsolete and "git" should be used instead. Is this an error in the package manager or in the website documentation?

Greets

Mario

Matthieu Moy· Jan 25, 2013, 14:06 UTC · re: Mario Michael Krell · lore

Re: git-core vs git package on ubuntu

Mario Michael Krell <supermariton@googlemail.com> writes:

> Dear git developers,
>
> In your documentation you say,

Which documentation?

> that git should be installed on Unix using
>
> apt-get install git-core

A quick grep shows that this is not the case in the documentation provided with Git, and it's not what I see on http://git-scm.com/download/linux either.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/

Konstantin Khomoutov· Jan 25, 2013, 14:06 UTC · re: Mario Michael Krell · lore

Re: git-core vs git package on ubuntu

On Fri, 25 Jan 2013 14:50:24 +0100 Mario Michael Krell <supermariton@googlemail.com> wrote:

> In your documentation you say, that git should be installed on Unix
> using
> 
> apt-get install git-core

Note that Ubuntu is not Unix.

> Unfortunately it tells the user, that this package is obsolete and
> "git" should be used instead. Is this an error in the package manager
> or in the website documentation?

Neither of them. Git was packaged for Debian (and hence appeared in Ubuntu) when another package with the name "git" already existed in the archive, and was unrelated to Git. So the Git package maintainer picked the name "git-core". After that, the maintainers of both packages discussed this issue and the maintainer of the original package named "git" agreed to change the name of his package, and then, subsequently, "git-core" has been renamed to "git", and the "git-core" package has been turned into transitional dummy obsolete package.

Now, whenever you're trying to install the "git-core" package, the package system tells you it's obsolete and suggests the "correct" package to install. After some time (the next OS release or later), the "git-core" package will be removed completely from the archive.

This is the standard way to handle such situations in Debian and its derivatives, so nothing special here. The documentation on the whatever site you were referring to should probably be updated as git-core is obsolete even in the current stable release of Debian [1]. I'm not sure which LTS release of Ubuntu is currently supported, but you might check the state of the git-core package in it yourself, using [2].

1. http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/git-core
2. http://packages.ubuntu.com

Matthieu Moy· Jan 25, 2013, 14:25 UTC · lore

Re: git-core vs git package on ubuntu

Cc-ing the Git list again.

Mario Michael Krell <supermariton@googlemail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I am sorry for being so unspecific. I had problems finding your
> mentioned website and quickly went through the "getting started"
> tutorial and found the mentioned command at:
>
> http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-Installing-Git

OK, this is the "pro Git" book. I just submitted a pull request:

  https://github.com/progit/progit/pull/358

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/