Re: [PATCH 6.5?/8] version: move --build-options to a test helper

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 08:45:53PM +0000, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 7:17 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> > The "git version" command didn't traditionally accept any
> > options, and in fact ignores any you give it. When we added
> > simple option parsing for "--build-options" in 6b9c38e14, we
> > didn't improve this; we just loop over the arguments and
> > pick out the one we recognize.
> >
> > Instead, let's move to a real parsing loop, complain about
> > nonsense options, and recognize conventions like "-h".
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
> > ---
> > I assume nobody was running "git version --foobar" and expecting it to
> > work. I guess we could also complain about "git version foobar" (no
> > dashes), but this patch doesn't. Mainly I wanted the auto-generated
> > options list.
> 
> Looks good to me. I started hacking this up the other day, but then
> thought "wait a minute, isn't this just a test helper?" and wrote this
> which I've rebased on top of your change.
> 
> I may be missing something here but isn't this a much straightforward
> way to accomplish this, or is this used by some external program
> outside of git.git that's going to rely on --build-options output?

My intent in putting it into the actual git binary was that it could
also be useful for collecting build-time knobs from users (who may be
using a binary package). Like:

  http://public-inbox.org/git/20160712035719.GA30281@sigill.intra.peff.net/

We haven't filled in that NEEDSWORK yet, but I'd rather see us go in
that direction than remove the option entirely.

-Peff