Hi Junio,

On Tue, 29 Oct 2019, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Emily Shaffer [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Thanks for the patience with the long wait, all. Here's an attempt at
the rewrite in C; I think it does verbatim what the sh version did
except that this doesn't print the reflog - Jonathan Nieder was good
enough to point out to me that folks probably don't want to share their
commit subjects all willy-nilly if they're working on something
secretive.

Is the goal to give a tool the end users can type "git
bugreport<RET>" and automatically send the result to this mailing
list (or some bug tracker)?  Or is this only about producing a
pre-filled bug report template to be slurped into their MUA and then
further manually edited before sending it out?

It probably is controversial if we exposed contents of hooks scripts
(I can imagine some people may trigger external process by pinging a
URL that includes credential material out of laziness), so the
presence test you have is probably a good stopping point.  I do not
know how much it helps to know which hooks exist in order to
diagnose an anomaly without knowing what their contents are, but it
is a start.

By the way, I doubt that it is the best use of developer time to
write these in C---taking various pieces of information from
different places to prepare a text file sounds more suited to
scripting languages, especially while we are still learning what
kind of information we want to collect and how we want to present
the final result (iow, for the first handful of years after
deploying this command).

If you want to limit Git to Linux, then relying on a specific scripting
language like Unix shell scripting sounds okay.

If you target more platforms, then a range of scripting languages sounds
a lot more sensible, my top choice would be node.js.

I understand that that is not an option here, and there is a strong
preference for Unix shell scripting in Git. This is a bit unfortunate:

A good chunk of the bug reports I see in Git for Windows are _about_
problems with Unix shell scripting. There are fork problems, problems
where `add_item` failed (which is one of the least helpful error
messages I saw in my entire life), there are problems with anti-malware
causing segmentation faults in the Unix shell script interpreter (the
MSYS2 Bash), and there are even (believe it or not) problems with
_display drivers_. Yes, that is right, display drivers can interfere
with Unix shell script execution on Windows. (This is really rare, but
hey, bug reports are rare in Git for Windows to begin with...)

All of these problems _prevent_ Unix shell scripts from being
interpreted as expected on Windows. Which would ridicule the idea of
reporting any of these bugs using a tool that is implemented in Unix
shell.

And what is worse than a bug in an application? A bug in the
application's very own bug reporting tool.

I pointed this out to Emily, and that is the reason why this amount of
work was put in to _improve_ the tool, precisely by _not_ implementing
it as a Unix shell script, but instead in plain C (which is a _lot_ more
robust).

Ciao,
Dscho