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

Jonathan Nieder [off-list ref] writes:

Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

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.

Yeah, the prompt does look pointless.

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.

I do not think I follow.  If the admin wants to eventually have
extra commands supported at the site, but not yet ready to do so,
isn't it more natural to start with a less elaborate configuration
(i.e. without the directory) now and then add the directory when the
site is ready for offering extra commands later?

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.

A paragraph I had in the message you are responding to before I sent
it out (but removed because it felt somewhat offtopic) said "if the
mechanism to disable weren't the magic 'help exited with failure'
but 'an interactive-disabled flag file exists there', I may find it
less strange to have the directory there", or something like that.

And that flag file could be a custom script that gives a custom
message.