On Wed, Jun 29, 2022 at 09:55:10AM +0200, Christian Franke wrote: > Christian Franke wrote: > > Adam Dinwoodie wrote: > > ... > > > > > I'm also vaguely pondering whether it's worth adding git as a > > > dependency. That's not strictly right, since etckeeper doesn't *need* > > > git, but it's going to be the use case for 99.9% of users, and in the > > > absence of Cygwin having a "recommends" style dependency, just adding > > > git seems like it might be sensible. But I'm far from convinced there. > > > > I'm also not sure and decided to add no git dependency. 99.8% of the > > users considering to install etckeeper may already have git installed > > :-) > > > > The Debian package does not use "rec" but "dep (git or hg or brz or > > darcs)" which defaults to git. > > If git is installed, the Debian postinst script runs 'etckeeper init && > > etckeeper commit' on fresh installs. I decided to leave this to the > > user. > > > > A possible simple extension which would allow the user to choose between > manual or automatic installation+initialization: > > Provide an optional package, for example "etckeeper-git-init", which depends > on etckeeper+git and only contains /etc/postinstall/etckeeper-git-init.sh > which triggers new initialization code in > /etc/postinstall/zp_zzz_etckeeper-postinstall.sh via some file in > /var/cache/etckeeper. This code performs 'etckeeper init && etckeeper > commit' if and only if VCS=git is selected and /etc/.git does not exist.
Honestly, I suspect it's not worth the effort of doing things like that. As you say, 99.8% of users who might be interested in using etckeeper are going to be people who already have a good idea what they're doing and will be able to work it out for themselves. Thinking about it some more, I'm also mildly concerned about the small but non-trivial proportion of users who blithely install every package available on Cygwin, which I don't think is going to be an issue for more-or-less any other *nix distribution. I don't normally think it's worth doing much to actively catering for those users -- I'm generally of the opinion that they're making their own misery -- but in this case automatically starting etckeeper would be a potentially significant impact, and for the sake of both their lives and yours, I suspect it's best to just leave etckeeper as something that requires manual initiation. That said, if you're keen to set up that optional package, I definitely don't think it's a bad idea; "it wouldn't be worth the effort to me" doesn't mean you shouldn't do it!
