Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by backendanon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

backendanon

git...is difficult to install? What's difficult about apt-get install git?

View on HN

For what it’s worth, on windows without wsl you literally have to bring half of a whole unix with you to run git.

Not really.

https://gitforwindows.org/

From that page: "Git for Windows provides a BASH emulation used to run Git from the command line. *NIX users should feel right at home, as the BASH emulation behaves just like the "git" command in LINUX and UNIX environments."

That's correct, it works automatically and is great to fix windows (when I have to work on windows) so it has some functionality but even if all I used out of that was git, it's easy. Is it all one exe? No. Does it need to be? No.

Git BASH (from that page) is what they referred to when they said "you literally have to bring half of a whole unix with you to run git".

GitBash, AutoHotkey, Notepad++, 7zip and PowerToys are the basic installs I do on any Windows I am given.

Any dev opening a CMD is suspect, to me.

Not for me, as Windows developers don't need to depend on UNIX culture.

The only thing that is debatable is using command prompt instead of powershell, unless for legacy scripts.

"Windows developers don't need to depend on UNIX culture."

Need to? No. Microsoft seems to think the UNIX culture is very important to them and to their products and WSL has achieved wide success:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about#:~:text=....

There was "Microsoft POSIX Subsystem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

There was "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix"

The first Microsoft OS was a UNIX variant called Xenix "The first operating system publicly released by the company was a variant of Unix announced on August 25, 1980. Acquired from AT&T through a distribution license, Microsoft dubbed it Xenix": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft

So lets put this in perspective.

Windows NT only got the bare minimum POSIX support for Windows NT to be allowed into DoD contracts. It was barely improved from there, and its SUA replacement was hardly any better.

Mostly ignored by Windows developers and finally put to sleep in 2003.

Xenix, which was actually my first UNIX experience, predates Windows 3.x success, and was largely ignored as Microsoft decided to focus on MS-DOS and OS/2.

WSL exists, because Microsoft realised plenty of people don't care about Linux, and rather buy Apple hardware for a POSIX experience, and since Linux kernel ABI matters more than POSIX in modern times, so WSL it is.

One needs to sell that Linux Desktop experience, that is taking decades to move percentiles.

None of that is relevant for Windows developers targeting Win32, and .NET technologies, the crown jewels.

Except that pretty much all cmdline scripts on Windows are either .bat or .ps scripts, which in turn have tons of Window-isms built into them.

If you are using bash on Windows that just tells me that the software you build probably won't be integrated all that well with Windows ;)

(git and other "UNIX-y" tools work mostly fine on cmd.exe btw)

"If you are using bash on Windows that just tells me that the software you build probably won't be integrated all that well with Windows ;)"

Microsoft (you may have heard of them) seems to disagree: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/azure-cli-learn-...

Azure is predominantly running Linux VMs, so that kinda reinforces my point. When targeting Linux, a UNIX shell is obviously the better choice.

CLI and GUI are different languages that are optimal for different use-cases. A dev who doesn't understand that and refuses to use CLI where appropriate is like a dev who would refuse to learn English. They are crawling when others can run.

"CLI and GUI are different languages"

CLI and GUI are User Experience (UX) paradigms. I do agree the CLI is supremely critical to most software development efforts.

Yeah that’s a feature.

Or instead of only half you can bring it whole with WSL2.

thb that "half of a unix" usually weights less than some other popular runtime envs

I'm a Linux person but often at work due to decades of Gates's effective brainwashing I almost always have to use windows on the desktop. IBM was the only exception. That said, on windows, all I do is get this https://git-scm.com/download/win run the installer and yes it installs stuff but it's literally all automatic. So it's easy on Windows and on Linux, Mac I don't know, I don't do Apple products.

> you have to rely on your OS packages (which includes all the kitchen sink stuff)

These is exactly what my first thought was! Installing open-ssh and git is kind of my first activity on a new computer. But I believe they are talking about setting up a git server. The thing that we rely on GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket for. Richard counts them as an added dependency.

(I mean, he is not wrong in being worried about that. You are basically giving your all your code to a company. Which does not matter for open-source projects like SQLite, but it does for many private projects with code as their primary IP)

Git server is just setting up ssh keys and a directory. The code base viewer runs with apache which is also pretty simple to get all set up

What is a “git server”? There’s no distinction between client and server in git; you can “git pull” from any machine with the normal “git” program installed that you have SSH access to.

Behold: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-daemon

Who uses git-daemon these days? When's the last time you saw git:// in a README?

Practically all use of git is either the "smart HTTP" protocol over HTTPS, or over SSH. git-daemon is plaintext, you wouldn't want to push over that, and for public use HTTPS has won.

I believe grandparent means what is these days called "forges", a web frontend with user accounts and such, with an extra heaping pile of features.

Even simpler in some cases, git and openssh were already installed.

I’ve been trying to install git on the hypervisor of my smartOS install intermittently for a year. I run into system package conflicts or key signing errors and then I give up and switch to a zone that isn’t so borked with package issues.

Then I go lament in the corner that I really should be serious about migrating this to 200TB home lab to anything else and then realize that the 200TB is not something easily backed up in the case FreeBSD or TrueNAS doesn’t understand my Zpool versions and all of those zones I created will need to be rebuilt as jails…

And my lamentations turn to tears. All because I wanted to just checkout some random project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com