Re: devel/git and devel/git-base are confusing

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

nia <nia%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:

> It came up in pkg/54365, and has been brought up by confused people on
> IRC various times. Actually, I started this thread because people were
> arguing about it on IRC and I wanted to propose something productive.

I'm not trying to be nasty here, but in pkgsrc we have DESCR that is
supposed to explain what's in a package.  I have made a point of fixing
these over the years when reading them doesn't lead to people getting
the right answer, particularly when we have multiple versions of a
package, but also for these sorts of splits.  I would rather explain to
people and get them to read DESCR, than to try to make assumptions work
correctly, especially think that this is impossible to do for everyone
and it feels like picking which 50% are unhappy.

> I remember it confusing me as a new user. FreeBSD, for example, has a
> separate git-gui package, and 'git' is git-without-GUI. Now that I
> know how things work, I'm happy to install git-base and git-docs,
> but I would like to clarify things for new users.

The idea of dropping git-gitk from the git metapackage, without the
renaming, does not seem nearly so objectionable.  But, so many are used
to what we have now that I think it needs to be really compelling
argument to change, balancing the breaking of learned expectations of
many with what I think is a smaller set.


I really do wonder if people in significant numbers are really
installing or trying to install 'git', and then having an actual problem
that tcl/tcl is on their system?  I can see the point about X, but these
days it seems normal to have the X clients on machines even if headless,
and pkgsrc more or less expects that (even though it works for programs
that don't use X).  I would think that perhaps pkgsrc should have a bit
more thorough use of the -x11 global option, and to advise people to use
it if one wants to avoid X11 clients.  That would be a good fix that
wouldn't hurt people (the doc, and dropping gitk from the metapackage on
-x11 option).


As a step to help people, I just edited devel/git/DESCR to mention the
contrib scripts and hint at git-base.  So I know expect anyone who reads
DESCR to not have trouble.