Re: [PATCH v3 1/9] bugreport: add tool to generate debugging info

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On Tue, 19 Nov 2019, Emily Shaffer wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 16, 2019 at 12:11:38PM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com> writes:
> >
> > > Teach Git how to prompt the user for a good bug report: reproduction
> > > steps, expected behavior, and actual behavior. Later, Git can learn how
> > > to collect some diagnostic information from the repository.
> >
> > It makes sense, but I do not think of any good reason why this
> > should be implemented as a builtin.  I'd expect it would probably
> > need to collect more info on the running environment than otherwise
> > necessary for the regular Git operation, and perhaps you'd want to
> > even link with libraries that are not needed for the regular Git
> > operation to achieve that.
> >
> > Can you make it a standalone binary instead to avoid bloat of the
> > main "git" binary?
>
> Sure. This would fix some other issues (needing to link against curl to
> get the curl version, which is exactly what you implied). I wasn't
> certain which circumstances a standalone binary was preferred, but I
> agree with your reasoning here for sure.

FWIW I disagree with the idea that a tiny built-in command like
`bugreport` would "bloat" the main `git` binary.

In contrast, I think that stand-alone commands _do_ bloat. Look here:

$ ls -lh git-daemon.exe git-credential-store.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 me 4096 1.8M Nov  6 13:43 git-credential-store.exe*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 me 4096 1.8M Nov  6 13:43 git-daemon.exe*

In other words, even a super simple stand-alone like `credential-store`
(the `credential-store.c` file has only 198 lines!) weighs in with almost
two megabytes.

So I fear that the claim that a stand-alone command would add less bloat
than a built-in one, especially for a relatively small thing like
`bugreport` has it exactly backwards.

Ciao,
Dscho