Re: [PATCH v12 3/5] bugreport: gather git version and build info

[Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>]

On Mon, Apr 06, 2020 at 04:17:51PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com> writes:
> 
> > It's not ideal to directly call 'git version --build-options' because
> > that output goes to stdout. Instead, wrap the version string in a helper
> > within help.[ch] library, and call that helper from within the bugreport
> > library.
> 
> This means that "git-bugreport" that can be a different binary from
> say "git-remote-curl" (or "git-version" for that matter) would still
> report whatever version string that was compiled into "bugreport".
> 
> Reporting the version of "bugreport" is *not* useless, and what this
> step adds to the report is good.  
> 
> But the version number of "bugreport" may not have much to do with
> the binary the end user is having trouble with, so we'd also want
> the version of the main part of "git", and other standalone "git"
> subprograms like "git-remote-curl", reported separately, probably
> together with $PATH, $GIT_EXEC_PATH and what appears in the
> directories listed on these environment variables.
> 
> If "git version --build-options" writes to its standard output
> stream, that is a good thing, as it makes it easy to spawn and read
> what it says via the run_command() API, and there is one less thing
> to worry about (it would be a bit more cumbersome if the output goes
> to the standard error stream).
> 
> As "git-remote-curl" would also be a separate binary, we'd have to
> use the same technique to report version number (and perhaps curl's
> library version and its configuration?), perhaps by teaching the
> subcommand a new option to dump such details to its standard output.
> 
> Using the same technique to report the version about the "git"
> itself would be consistent thing to do, as a preparation for future
> steps that reports the details about "git-remote-curl".

Sure. I will include a run_command() call to "git version
--build-options" (or is it --build-info?) in the same series where I
re-introduce the call to "git-remote-curl", since they will look pretty
similar; around that time I will clean up what "git-bugreport" reports
about its own version/build info, too.

To be clear, do you want me to include the output of get_compiler_info()
in "git version --build-options" when I do that change, too?

 - Emily