Re: [PATCH/RFC 0/4] Providing mechanism to list available repositories

[Greg Brockman <gdb@MIT.EDU>]

>> We find this mechanism useful in that it requires no extra
>> infrastructure on either our end or the user's end.  Our
>> implementation is extensible, allowing the system administrator to
>> place arbitrary commands in ~/git-shell-commands (if the directory is
>> omitted, no extra functionality is exposed), and also supports an
>> interactive mode.
>>
>> What do people think of this approach?  I'd love to get this
>> functionality merged in some form.
>
> It seems to me that any time you need to add a new helper command, the
> administrator needs to make sure that appears in ~$user/git-shell-commands
> of all the users who need it.  When adding a new user, a similar
> management action needs to happen.  Perhaps that is done by making a
> symlink from all the users' home directories to one shared place.  Is that
> the general idea?
That's correct.  Our particular environment only has a single git
user, but if we were to add more we would probably make
git-shell-commands a symlink as you suggest.

> In any case, I'd prefer that the sample command implementations like list
> and help to live in contrib/ somewhere.  They are not part of what the
> main Makefile needs to know about, right?
Also correct.  I'll look for a reasonable place within contrib/ to put them.