Subject: Re: bug: git-sh-setup should not be in $PATH

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 18:11:28 +0100

Dnia środa 6. grudnia 2006 17:56, Han-Wen Nienhuys napisał:
> Jakub Narebski escreveu:
>
>> I'm still not sure if this has place in git. Is it really common to
>> support building outside source directory? If git didn't support this,
>> so what?
> 
> lots of serious tools support it, as it this comes automatically
> when using automake. Eg. emacs, gcc, make, pango, lilypond, etc etc. 
> 
> It's a quite standard feature ; you should be asking why git 
> shouldn't support it.

Because git is not autotool'ed project. And people protested vehemently
against adding yet another dependency. So from the whole autotools suite
only autoconf is used, and only to generate config.mak.autogen Makefile
configuration, which otherwise would be needed to be generated by hand.

BTW git tries to guess configuration based on uname -a result.

There was also for a little while hand-generated configure script, but
it got abandoned when it appeared that it is hard to be portable (and
autoconf did the work; perhaps too hard but did, not using features
which weren't common but now are in standard, but did), and the fact
that it was possible to have _optional_ autoconf support.
 
Add to that the fact that people said that ./configure on Cygwin is slow
(can be slow), so they prefer _not_ to run this.

Besides, the fact that some tools suport some feature is not the reason
to add it. You have to look at how often is this feature _used_. For
example you don't need it (you need only DESTDIR support) for creating
RPMS from sources.

-- 
Jakub Narebski