Re: categorization, documentation and packaging of "git core" commands

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>]

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018, Todd Zullinger wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > first, here are the executables under /usr/libexec/git-core/ that
> > are unreferenced by that web page, but that should be fine as
> > almost all of them would be considered underlying helpers or
> > utilities (except for things like git-subtree, but we're still
> > unclear on its status, right?):
>
> I don't think there's anything unclear about git subtree's status.
> It's in contrib/ within the source, so it's not part of the core git
> suite.  Some distributions (Fedora being one of them) ship a
> git-subtree package to provide it for users who want it.
>
> > on the other hand (and this is not so much a git issue as a fedora
> > packaging issue), there are a number of command links at that web
> > page that are supplied by distinct RPM packages rather than by the
> > basic fedora git package, so one would need to install the
> > following packages to get some of those commands on fedora:
> >
> >   * gitk
> >   * git-cvs
> >   * git-svn
> >   * git-p4
> >   * git-email (provides git-send-email)
>
> These packages are in separate sub-packages in Fedora (and some
> other distributions) because they are no required by all users and
> they pull in dependencies which are not wanted on minimal installs.
> In Fedora, you can install git-all to get all the available git
> sub-packages.

  not to belabour this (and i'm sure it's *way* too late for that),
but fedora has the following packaging scheme.  first, there's a bunch
of stuff in "git-core", which has no dependencies on any other
git-related packages.

  then there's "git", which has the following property:

  $ rpm -qR git
  /bin/sh
  /usr/bin/perl
  emacs-filesystem >= 25.3
  git-core = 2.14.3-2.fc27
  git-core-doc = 2.14.3-2.fc27
  ... snip ...

  $ rpm -ql git
  ... snip ...
  /usr/libexec/git-core/git-add--interactive
  /usr/libexec/git-core/git-am
  /usr/libexec/git-core/git-credential-libsecret
  /usr/libexec/git-core/git-credential-netrc
  /usr/libexec/git-core/git-difftool
  /usr/libexec/git-core/git-difftool--helper
  /usr/libexec/git-core/git-instaweb
  /usr/libexec/git-core/git-request-pull
  /usr/libexec/git-core/git-submodule
  /usr/libexec/git-core/git-submodule--helper
  ... snip ...
  /usr/share/man/man1/git-am.1.gz
  /usr/share/man/man1/git-difftool.1.gz
  /usr/share/man/man1/git-instaweb.1.gz
  /usr/share/man/man1/git-request-pull.1.gz
  /usr/share/man/man1/git-submodule.1.gz
  /usr/share/man/man1/gitweb.1.gz
  /usr/share/man/man5/gitweb.conf.5.gz
  $

so with fedora, "git" drags in "git-core" and a small number of
additional git utilities. all of this leads one to wonder -- is there
any comprehensible relationship between:

  1) commands that claim to be in the "git suite"
  2) commands that come from contrib/
  3) commands listed at
     https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/
  4) how different distros package all of the above

as i think we've noticed, it's not at all clear how git decides what
is and isn't part of the "official" git suite.

rday

-- 

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
========================================================================