[rescue] Has freshmeat.net disappeared forever?

[Peter Corlett]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 07:23:34PM +0000, microcode at zoho.com wrote:
[...]
> It seems to me that git is very much based on the idea that Linux is all
> there is (not all that surprising considering its history) and is hard to
> build anywhere else. Have you tried building it from source on another
> platform? I think the fact that Git requires quite a few gnu pieces to build,
> including bash does mean it is Linux specific.

Bash is hardly unknown outside of the Linux world. It's the default shell on
OSX and is a "pkg install" away on FreeBSD, for example. OSX doesn't provide a
toolchain out of the box, but XCode is a free download from Apple. You can
ignore the XCode IDE -- which is only really of use if you're building native
GUI applications -- and use the command-line tools which have much of what you
might want: flex, bison, automake, GNU Make, etc. The compiler is clang rather
than gcc, but this is arguably a feature, not a bug.

I installed git on OSX using Homebrew. Looking at the Homebrew package bumph,
it seems that it compiles just fine from the upstream sources without patching.
I certainly didn't have to do anything beyond "brew install git" to get it
installed.

(FWIW, it took 100 CPU-seconds or 34 wall-seconds to download and compile it
from source on this eight-CPU Mac.)

> I found it very difficult to get a complete build of Git on Solaris 10
> because of Git's reliance on gcc-isms and gnu prereqs. I eventually got the
> code built but the doc would not build. I had to download and install the man
> pages separately and that was not all the doc you would get if the build had
> worked. I did this in a zone for a developer who asked for git because he was
> working on a project on Linux that was supposed to work on Solaris but
> didn't. It took more time to get Git working than fixing the code problem.

Oracle is a patent troll selling a closed proprietary Unix that is deliberately
designed to be different to lock people into the platform. So it's hardly a
surprise that supporting Solaris isn't exactly a priority for developers who
aren't being paid to fight it.

I expect it builds fine (or even comes out of the box) on more open Solaris
derivatives such as Illumos and SmartOS.

> I readily acknowledge that UNIX development is not my thing, but looking
> around the net I saw many indications that building Git on Solaris 10 was
> non-trivial.

The first hurdle is of course that one has to give many thousands of pounds to
Oracle to get a working and supported system, instead of something cobbled
together from warez ISOs knocking around the retrocomputing community.