Re: [PATCH 1/2] Add expat and expat-devel dependencies (for http-push) to RPM spec.

Linus Torvalds wrote:

If there's some way to "suggest" ssh when installing git, that would be 
good, but I don't think rpm has that.

It hasn't. It was designed to update software non-interactively.

And if somebody doesn't have ssh 
installed, they probably don't have a network, so maybe even that is 
unnecessary.

I *think* the ssh transport should work nicely over rsh as well. I don't 
have the slightest idea of where to find an rsh installation to test it 
with though.

So depending on the curl _program_ would fall under the same harmless case 
as depending on ssh and rsync, but the thing is, we depend on it as a 
library, which is why we should split things up.

True. But HTTP is a very simple protocol and git only uses a very small 
portion of curl's capabilities so it wouldn't be rocket-science to hack 
up some micro-replacement and always use the shipped stuff.

quoted

Moving out the {cvs,arch,svn}-import scripts made sense because they 
were only faintly related to git day-to-day operations and forced some 
really ridiculous dependencies down users throats (git requiring 
subversion was a funny one...).

Yes. 

NOTE! Git does actually require the "merge" program,

That depends on how it's used. If some script expects 'merge' to be 
there and does things that might break the index if it isn't, then it's 
required.

which sometimes comes 
with the diff3 package, and more often comes with rcs.  As with ssh and 
rsync, it's an external program and only really required if you do 
development (you can fast-forward something that you're only tracking 
read-only without it), so in theory you don't absolutely need it, but we 
do have a dependency on RCS right now due to that.

It could require /usr/bin/merge instead. Seeing as people who install 
packages usually installs other things as packages too this would 
probably make more sense.

Which is a bit strange, and sometimes wrong (the same machine that doesn't 
have curl installed also doesn't have rcs installed, but I compile git on 
it anyway, and it works fine, since I use that machine only as a backup 
thing to receive git packs - in case kernel.org goes down _and_ all my 
home machines magically turn into pumpkins, I'll still have another site 
I can get my git repos from).

Still though, be kind to the fairy godmother. ;)

quoted

While we're on the subject of confusing; How about not naming non-core
packages git-core? It feels wrong to have git-core-http, git-core-cvs and
git-core-svn since they, strictly speaking, aren't required for core
operations.

Yeah, that "git-core-xxx" thing is a bit strange, but on the other hand, 
it does make it clear that they all come from the same SRPM (the 
"git-core" SRPM) so in the end I think it's actually a good idea.

The change would only mean that all packages will come from the "git" 
SRPM rather than the "git-core" SRPM so this point is moot unless there 
will ever be such a thing as the "git" SRPM to contend with (which will 
be less likely if we're it, so to speak).

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231