Re: [RFC/PATCH] shell: allow 'help' command to disable interactive shell

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> The purpose of the directory is to keep custom commands that are
> allowed.  If the site administrator does not want any command, it
> would be more natural to expect that the way to disable them would
> be _not_ to have that directory which is a collection of allowed
> commands.  Adding that directory and add a "help" that exits with
> non-zero feels quite a roundabout and counter-intuitive way, no?

I think it comes down to the reason the site admin doesn't want to
allow interactive logins.  That reason seems to be mostly that
presenting a

	git>

prompt at which you can only ask for "help" or "exit" is a bit
confusing and pointless.  I have sympathy for that, which is why I
looked for a way for the admin to ask to avoid the prompt altogether
in that case.

I do not think the reason is "because I don't want a
git-shell-commands directory".  I think it's good to have basically
one kind of setup instead of significantly different ones with and
without that special directory --- and it means that starting from a
setup like this, one can easily drop in additional commands like
set-head or create-repo without changing anything basic.  It's making
the admin's later life easier.

Maybe a better test than "help exits with special exit code" is "there
are no other custom commands than help".  Would that be more sensible?

>From a "make it possible to emulate gitolite" point of view, that
doesn't permit disabling the interactive mode when there are other
commands available, so my hunch is that it wouldn't.

Jonathan