On 2021-03-18 at 17:00:04, Jeff King wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 04:33:52PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> > 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.

Yeah, and I think that https://bugs.debian.org/953875 has fixed the
problem where installing runit (by using git-daemon-run) would switch
the default init system.  So in bullseye, this will probably be
fixed even if the daemon does get installed.

I think the person who previously maintained both Git and runit in
Debian was busy with other things for a while, which prevented this
issue from being fixed.  Now Jonathan is maintaining Git (and is doing a
great job, especially with the next builds in experimental) and someone
else has taken over runit and fixed the problem mentioned above, which
occasionally caused this same problem with other packages as well.

So I think this will sort itself out in the next release, and in the
meantime, just be careful with git-all in buster and older.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US