Re: Git install crashed nearly whole System

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 04:33:52PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

> > I'm a little confused. Is the instruction on "
> > https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git" not the
> > official one? As you can see there, the first part is how to install
> > git with your package manager (git-all).
> 
> That is probably out of date, and I'd suggest reporting it to the
> appropriate spot, which is _probably_ https://github.com/git/git-scm.com
> (although it might be a separate repo).  The git-all package has had
> this problem for some time now, so I wouldn't recommend it as the
> default option.

The book content gets pulled in from a separate repo via an automated
process. The right spot here is https://github.com/progit/progit2.

We do recommend just "apt install git" on the downloads page:

  https://git-scm.com/download/linux

though that has created occasional confusion, too (e.g., some people
expect gitk).

> > Should I remove everything form "git-all" and reinstall everything
> > according to your advise? It seems no git daemon is working right now
> > (systemctl | grep git).
> 
> If everything's working for you, there's no need to change it.  It's
> _possible_ to install git-all and not have this problem, but because of
> the way modern versions of Debian and the packages in question are
> configured it ends up tending to have this problem by default.
> 
> In this case, it may be that git-daemon is installed but not configured
> to start, or it may have been removed when you reinstalled GNOME since
> it's not a hard dependency.

Yeah. I think fundamentally this is a packaging issue. It looks like
"git-daemon-*" has been downgraded to "Suggests" in Debian unstable. It
looks like this was done in 1:2.26.0-2 last April. From the changelog:

    * debian/control: downgrade Recommends by git-all on git-daemon-run
    to Suggests. The git-all package is a "batteries included" full
    installation of Git. Automatically running a daemon is not useful
    to most of its users.

So they are already aware of and addressed the problem, but older
releases will still show it.

-Peff