#613892 git dependency on git-man

Package:
git
Source:
git
Description:
fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
Submitter:
"Nelson A. de Oliveira"
Date:
2024-07-06 14:27:08 UTC
Severity:
wishlist
Tags:
#613892#5
Date:
2011-02-18 00:34:26 UTC
From:
To:
Hi!

The new git version has a dependency on git-man.
While they were distributed together as a "git" only package, can't the
dependency be weaker? (a recommends instead depends, maybe)

Thank you!

Best regards,
Nelson

#613892#10
Date:
2011-02-18 00:45:02 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Nelson,

Nelson A. de Oliveira wrote:

The manpages are used to support the "git <command> --help".  I don't
see anything wrong with demoting it to a Recommends if, when the
manpages are missing, "git <command> --help" would print a message
indicating that you should ask your sysadmin to install git-man.

Would you be interested in that?

Thanks,
Jonathan

#613892#15
Date:
2011-02-18 01:25:44 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Jonathan!

Exactly something like this that I was thinking.
But thinking better, it will cause more pain than gain, right?

Best regards,
Nelson

#613892#20
Date:
2011-02-18 01:30:29 UTC
From:
To:
Nelson A. de Oliveira wrote:

No, I suspect more gain, though I probably will not work on it any
time soon.  The place to patch is show_man_page() in builtin/help.c
for the interested.

#613892#25
Date:
2011-02-24 07:41:55 UTC
From:
To:
Nelson A. de Oliveira wrote:

I changed my mind.  Yes, it would cause more pain than gain. :)

Thanks.

Regards,
Jonathan

#613892#46
Date:
2017-10-03 21:46:50 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

I can only agree with Nelson. These days, a lot of git installations are
non-interactive to begin with, as part of some service or so. Nobody is
ever going to read the manual pages in such use cases. It's just a waste
- and if the packages are being generated separately, anyway, weakening
the dependency seems to be just a logical consequence.

It would be nice if you could do it.

TIA!


Cheers,
--Toni++

#613892#51
Date:
2017-10-03 22:15:26 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

Toni Mueller wrote:

Have you read https://bugs.debian.org/613892#10?  Would you be
interested in working on a patch for upstream Git to do that?  We can
make the error message printed when manpages are missing a value set
at compile time (see the Makefile for existing compile-time parameters
like DEFAULT_EDITOR).  I'm happy to give pointers, etc. to anyone
wanting to work on this.

Sincerely,
Jonathan

#613892#56
Date:
2017-10-04 17:20:45 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Jonathan,

I actually followed a different route and created a patch which is
Debian-specific. Please have a look - it is not yet polished in any way,
esp. all the translations are missing. The patch is against git in
unstable.


Cheers,
--Toni++

#613892#61
Date:
2017-10-04 17:28:12 UTC
From:
To:
Toni Mueller wrote:

Thanks!  This is an excellent starting point.  I'll be happy to tweak
this to make it configurable enough for upstream.  I'll also look into
getting the Debian-specific text translated, which will be a new
adventure for me.

May I have your sign-off?  (See Documentation/SubmittingPatches
section 5 "Certify your work" for what this means.)

Thanks,
Jonathan

#613892#66
Date:
2017-10-04 17:36:29 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Jonathan,

thanks for the flowers!
appropriate location:

Signed-off-by: Toni Mueller <mail@tonimueller.org>


Cheers,
--Toni++

#613892#73
Date:
2020-01-05 10:52:58 UTC
From:
To:
#613892#84
Date:
2024-07-06 14:24:18 UTC
From:
To:
Did anyone submit a patch to git to work well when no man pages are installed?
Also please note that all man packages have a *-doc suffix, not the *-man.
It probably can't be renamed now but just to note this to avoid in future.

The git package itself also contains a lot of docs in the
/usr/share/doc/git folder:


It looks like some of them should be moved to a separate folder
RelNotes: why would I need the release notes starting from v1.5.0
contrib: it contains some additional tools that not even related to a
documentation and definitely should be extracted to a separate package
README files: they are for git devs themselves

In total all these files take 2.2 MB of disk space.

If we can make the git smaller that would be great.
Even now it's not that big to be included by default to desktop
distributions to make it easier for students or new users to start
programming.