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

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 10:27:08PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

quoted

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.

Hmm. So I tried just building oxskeychain in our CI via contrib, and it
fails. :(

It looks like it's OK with clang, but not gcc:

  https://github.com/peff/git/runs/2647748209?check_suite_focus=true

Maybe nobody cares about gcc for this use, but I'm inclined to leave it
to somebody who actually runs macOS to poke at further.

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.

I assume you mean contrib/credential/libsecret here. I'd worry that
flipping it on by default is annoying for people who build from source.
I don't have dev libraries for things like libsecret or glib on my
development system[1], and I'd be surprised if most server-oriented
machines have even the non-dev versions.

Which isn't an argument against making it easier to build them from the
main Makefile, but it seems like having them on by default (with a
NO_LIBSECRET) would cause more surprises than the other way around
(USE_LIBSECRET or similar).

I suspect that just opening a bug report against distro packages might
get some traction (especially if it comes with a patch to create the
extra package). I do wonder if packagers are hesitant to reach into
contrib/, not knowing how well maintained the contents are (to be
honest, I am not confident in how well maintained they are, either; it
might be helpful if somebody who routinely used each helper stepped up
to say that they would maintain it).

-Peff

[1] I was actually surprised I had libsecret installed at all.
    Apparently pinentry-gtk2 links against it, which I have for use with
    gpg. But my system might not be considered typical anyway, as I
    don't use any kind of "desktop environment".