Re: [PATCH 3/3] gnu: Add vcsh

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 09:01:00PM +0100, Andreas Enge wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 07:11:44PM -0500, Leo Famulari wrote:
> > I missed this earlier. We don't usually propagate this sort of "end-user
> > program" dependencies. For example rsync does not propagate ssh; the
> > user must install ssh. [0]
> 
> I think the cleanest approach would be to patch all calls to "git" in
> the vcsh shell script by calls to "/gnu/store/xxxx-git-.../bin/git",
> where the base name is taken as "(assoc-ref %build-inputs "git")" or the like.
> 
> What do you think?

Indeed, this sounds like a clean solution. In that case, git would be a
plain input.

> 
> It might be as simple as a call in a phase to "substitute*", replacing
> "git " by the path+" ". The script is a bit annoying in that it scatters
> calls to git all over the place. It would be cleaner to define "GIT=git"
> at the start of the file, and then always call "$(GIT)". Maybe that is
> something to suggest to the upstream author?

Since 'git' is such a short string, the possibility of "mis-patching"
when performing the string substitution seems a little too high. What do
you think?