Re: [PATCH] git-sh-setup: Restore sourcability from outside scripts

,On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 10:12 PM, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 08:09:21PM -0000, Philip Oakley wrote:

quoted

quoted

It is documented (Documentation/git-sh-setup.txt), and this is not the
internal Documentation/technical section of the documentation, so my
default assumption would be that everything shown there is intended as
public.  I only bring this up as a question because it was apparently
allowed to break.  If I’m wrong and it isn’t public, other patches are
needed (to the documentation and to its users in contrib).

But the Documenation does say ::

- This is not a command the end user would want to run. Ever.

- This documentation is meant for people who are studying the Porcelain-ish
scripts and/or are writing new ones.
--

Historically speaking, porcelain-ish scripts were carried both in and
out of git.git. These days what we consider porcelain is usually carried
in-tree, but I don't think it's unreasonable for people building their
own scripts to want to make use of git-sh-setup. And we've generally
tried to retain backwards compatibility in the functions it provides,
even to out-of-tree scripts.

So I think it is worth applying the fix at the start of this thread to
keep that working.

As for a documentation change for "do not use this for out-of-tree
scripts", I am mildly negative, as I don't think that matches historical
practice.

I don't see why we shouldn't have some stable shellscript function API
if that's needed either.

I just wanted to point out that currently git-sh-setup isn't
documented as such. So at least a follow-up patch to the documentation
seems in order.

This did break in v2.10.0, and it's taken a couple of months to notice
this, so clearly it's not very widely used, which says something about
the cost-benefit of maintaining this for external users.

It's probably worthwhile to split off git-sh-setup into git-sh-setup &
git-sh-setup-internal along with a documentation fix. A lot of what
it's doing (e.g. git_broken_path_fix(), and adding a die() function)
is probably only needed internally by git itself. The
git-sh-setup-internal should be the thing sourcing "git-sh-i18n", I
don't see how anyone out-of-tree could make use of that. Surely nobody
needs to re-emit the exact message we shipped with our *.po files.