Re: git-instaweb should 'just work' on Mac OS X

[nathan spindel <nathans@gmail.com>]

On May 10, 2008, at 3:49 PM, Kevin Ballard wrote:

> On May 10, 2008, at 2:27 PM, nathan spindel wrote:
>
>> I've investigated what it would take for git-instaweb to 'just  
>> work' on
>> Mac OS X 10.5 when running the command with no arguments. This  
>> would be
>> of benefit to many Mac git users since they shouldn't be expected to
>> troubleshoot this problem. Here are the current issues at play:
>>
>> - lighttpd does not come with Mac OS X by default, so git-instaweb
>>  currently exits with "lighttpd not found...".
>>
>> - git-instaweb doesn't fallback to using other web servers on the  
>> system
>>  if the default command doesn't exist.
>>
>> - Mac OS X does come with webrick and 'git-instaweb -d webrick'  
>> _does_ just
>>  work. It's probably slower than Apache though (?).
>>
>> - Mac OS X also comes with mongrel, which is a great alternative, but
>>  git-instaweb doesn't support it.
>>
>> - Mac OS X's Apache installation is different than what git-instaweb
>>  expects in a couple areas:
>>  - the Apache binary is called 'httpd', not 'apache2', and git- 
>> instaweb
>>    only looks for the latter.
>>  - the modules on Mac OS X live in /usr/libexec/apache2 but by  
>> default
>>    git-instaweb looks for /usr/lib/apache2/modules.
>>  - Apache attempts to create its 'accept serialization lock file' at
>>    /private/var/run/ but that path is only writeable by root (a  
>> workaround
>>    is to add a LockFile directive to the conf file that places it
>>    in $fqgitdir/gitweb/tmp).
>>
>> I'm interested in fixing this to make the experience smoother for  
>> Mac users.
>> What is the community's preferred avenue of fixing this?
>
> If I were to fix this, I'd suggest making apache2 work properly. I  
> patched the git-svn tests to do this a while back, so you could look  
> at what's I did there (3644da7214).

Thanks Kevin. Your patch is similar to how I imagined fixing apache2.

Would you suggest fixing the other non-starter issue (git-instaweb  
doesn't fallback to other daemons if the default doesn't exist)?  Or  
maybe changing the default to apache2 on Mac OS X installs (that seems  
like a poorer fix)?

-nathan