Re: git-core vs git package on ubuntu

[Konstantin Khomoutov <flatworm@users.sourceforge.net>]

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 Unfortunately it tells the user, that this package is obsolete and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git-core is obsolete even in the current stable release of Debian [1].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