bug#25957: gitolite broken: created repositories keep references to /usr/bin for hooks

["Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

On Fri, Sep 2, 2022 at 3:00 AM Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> wrote:
>
> I took a look at the gitolite service finally and I hadn't realized
> there wasn't a running daemon to containerize. I assumed we could do
> something like:
>
> (start $~(make-forkexec-constructor/container
>             (list ...)
>             #:environment-variables
>             '("PATH=...")
>             #:mappings ...))
>
> Given that's not the case then I'd need to look at gitolite itself to
> see how it calls the other binaries it expects to be available, and if
> wrapping it would be enough or if we would need to just propagate the
> other packages for functionality.

Gitolite simply expects tools like git to be on $PATH.  It's a pretty
naive system, there's nothing like a configure script that is
determining the absolute file name of these tools and substituting
those names into the built files.

The executable is already wrapped so that coreutils, findutils, and
git are on $PATH, but notably not openssh:

(add-after 'install 'wrap-scripts
                    (lambda* (#:key inputs outputs #:allow-other-keys)
                      (let ((out (assoc-ref outputs "out"))
                            (coreutils (assoc-ref inputs "coreutils"))
                            (findutils (assoc-ref inputs "findutils"))
                            (git (assoc-ref inputs "git")))
                        (wrap-program (string-append out "/bin/gitolite")
                          `("PATH" ":" prefix
                            ,(map (lambda (dir)
                                    (string-append dir "/bin"))
                                  (list out coreutils findutils git)))))))

However, git and openssh are still propagated inputs. I'm going to
move the propagated inputs to regular inputs, potentially add openssh
to the wrapper once I remind myself what gitolite does with those
tools, and test it all out on my server using the gitolite service.
If that all works, we have a good starting point for adding extension
support in the service.

- Dave