Re: [Administrivia] On ruby and contrib/

On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 10:02 PM, David Lang [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, 4 Jun 2013, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:


On Ruby:

Assuming "related" is a good idea, to make it as the proper part of
the system out of contrib/ when its design review phase is finished,
one of these things has to happen:

1. Find a volunteer to rewrite it in one of the languages that we
   know the platforms our current users use already support, which
   means either C (not a good match), POSIX shell (not the best
   match), or Perl.

2. Promote Ruby to the first-class citizen status, which involves
   making sure people on platforms that matter do not have problem
   adding dependency on it (I am primarily worried about MinGW
   folks), and also making sure core developers do not mind
   reviewing code written in it.

As long as we can get as high quality reviews on changes written in
Ruby as we do for the current codebase, it is OK to go route #2, and
that may hopefully happen in the longer term as and there will be
some people, among competent Ruby programmers, who have understood
how the pieces of entire Git are designed to fit together by the
time it happens.

I however do not know how much extra burden it would place to add
dependencies to platform folks, so obviously the safer approach is 1
at least in the immediate future.  My understanding is that msysgit
folks are already having trouble with Python, and we do not want to
go route #2 at least for now.  Having to ship a variant of Git with
NO_PYTHON is already bad enough.  And that is why the option 1 above
does not list Python as a possible candidate.

As someone who builds minimalist builds (firewalls, openwrt, raspberry pi,
etc), having to pull in a full ruby install to get git installed would not
be something I'd like to see.

You wouldn't _have_ to, just like you don't _have_ to install Python right now.

-- 
Felipe Contreras