Re: [Bug] git-credential-netrc.perl is not built and is not available in `exec-path`

On 2021-05-21 at 10:04:53, Jeff King wrote:

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 01:55:32AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

quoted

Things in contrib are not built by default because they don't
necessarily work everywhere.  For example, the osxkeychain credential
helper won't compile on Linux because the requisite shared libraries
are specific to macOS.  You'll need to compile them manually and install
them in a suitable location.

I agree with this, but just following up with a bit of a devil's
advocate: why not put osxkeychain into a regular "make install", but
make it conditional via a Makefile knob, like we do for other
platform-specific features?

Sure, let's do it.

For osxkeychain, it's probably pretty simple to always build it, since
macOS will always have the appropriate libraries if the compiler is
installed.  I would be in favor of also building by default on Linux and
having a Makefile knob to disable that, since the requisite libraries are
a part of nearly every distribution and doing so will spur distros to
ship it, which many do not.

And yet, my impression is that basically every Git user on macOS is
using it every day, because both Apple Git and homebrew build it by
default (and I think at least in the case of Apple Git, it's hard-coded
into the config). A little scary, but nobody seems to have complained. :)

I wonder if we could build it and run it through t0303 as part of the
mac CI process (though I recall at the time that it was really finicky
for automated testing; it wouldn't even run over an ssh session).

Likewise, we probably could be building and testing the libsecret ones
via the Linux CI job (I don't use those either myself, but presumably
they pass t0303).

Running the tests will be harder.  macOS, I believe, requires an
interactive session to have the keychain unlocked, and on Linux, you
require gnome-keyring or an equivalent daemon running, which practically
means that you need a desktop session.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US