[RFC/PATCH 0/5] stop installing old libexec aliases like "git-init"

From: "Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>
To: git@vger.kernel.org
Cc: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>,
	"Daniel Jacques" <dnj@google.com>,
	"Johannes Schindelin" <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>,
	"Steffen Prohaska" <prohaska@zib.de>,
	"John Keeping" <john@keeping.me.uk>, "Stan Hu" <stanhu@gmail.com>,
	"Richard Clamp" <richardc@unixbeard.net>,
	"Jeff King" <peff@peff.net>,
	"Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>
Subject: [RFC/PATCH 0/5] stop installing old libexec aliases like "git-init"
Date: Fri,  2 Nov 2018 22:37:38 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20181102223743.4331-1-avarab@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87efkkdwcv.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

I think up to patch 4 here should be near a state that's ready for
inclusion.

Although I'm on the fence with the approach in 1/5. Should this be a
giant getopt switch statement like that in a helper script? An
alternative would be to write out a shell file similar to
GIT-BUILD-OPTIONS and source that from this thing. I don't know, what
do you all think?

The idea with 4/5 was to make this symlink mode the default in
config.mak.uname and have a blacklist of systems like Windows that
couldn't deal with it.

Since my ad874608d8 ("Makefile: optionally symlink libexec/git-core
binaries to bin/git", 2018-03-13) I see that e.g. Debian and GitLab
have started shipping with the INSTALL_SYMLINKS flag, so making that
unconditional is the next logical step.

The 5th one is more radical. See
https://public-inbox.org/git/87woyfdkoi.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com/ from
back in March for context.

I'd like to say it's ready, but I've spotted some fallout:

 * Help like "git ninit" suggesting "git init" doesn't work, this is
   because load_command_list() in help.c doesn't look out our
   in-memory idea of builtins, it reads the libexecdir, so if we don't
   have the programs there it doesn't know about it.

 * GIT_TEST_INSTALLED breaks entirely under this, as early as the
   heuristic for "are we built?" being "do we have git-init in
   libexecdir?". I tried a bit to make this work, but there's a lot of
   dependencies there.

 * We still (and this is also true of my ad874608d8) hardlink
   everything in the build dir via a different part of the Makefile,
   ideally we should do exactly the same thing there so also normal
   tests and not just GIT_TEST_INSTALLED (if that worked) would test
   in the same mode.

   I gave making that work a bit of a try and gave up in the Makefile
   jungle.

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason (5):
  Makefile: move long inline shell loops in "install" into helper
  Makefile: conform some of the code to our coding standards
  Makefile: stop hiding failures during "install"
  Makefile: add NO_INSTALL_SYMLINKS_FALLBACK switch
  Makefile: Add a NO_INSTALL_BUILTIN_EXECDIR_ALIASES flag

 Makefile         |  65 +++++++++++--------------
 install_programs | 124 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 151 insertions(+), 38 deletions(-)
 create mode 100755 install_programs

-- 
2.19.1.930.g4563a0d9d0