On 2021-05-21 at 10:04:53, Jeff King wrote:
> On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 01:55:32AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> > Things in contrib are not built by default because they don't
> > necessarily work everywhere.  For example, the osxkeychain credential
> > helper won't compile on Linux because the requisite shared libraries
> > are specific to macOS.  You'll need to compile them manually and install
> > them in a suitable location.
> 
> I agree with this, but just following up with a bit of a devil's
> advocate: why not put osxkeychain into a regular "make install", but
> make it conditional via a Makefile knob, like we do for other
> platform-specific features?

Sure, let's do it.

For osxkeychain, it's probably pretty simple to always build it, since
macOS will always have the appropriate libraries if the compiler is
installed.  I would be in favor of also building by default on Linux and
having a Makefile knob to disable that, since the requisite libraries are
a part of nearly every distribution and doing so will spur distros to
ship it, which many do not.

> And yet, my impression is that basically every Git user on macOS is
> using it every day, because both Apple Git and homebrew build it by
> default (and I think at least in the case of Apple Git, it's hard-coded
> into the config). A little scary, but nobody seems to have complained. :)
> 
> I wonder if we could build it and run it through t0303 as part of the
> mac CI process (though I recall at the time that it was really finicky
> for automated testing; it wouldn't even run over an ssh session).
> 
> Likewise, we probably could be building and testing the libsecret ones
> via the Linux CI job (I don't use those either myself, but presumably
> they pass t0303).

Running the tests will be harder.  macOS, I believe, requires an
interactive session to have the keychain unlocked, and on Linux, you
require gnome-keyring or an equivalent daemon running, which practically
means that you need a desktop session.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US