Tim, the Enchanter

Between mine and Geoff's efforts, we've finally reached a point where the Git OS X Installer is deemed "stable", and has now become an official source on Git's home page. There were a few major hurdles along the way:

HURDLES & SOLUTIONS:

HURDLE: Ruby script to update PATH and MANPATH failed on some machines

SOLUTION:

• Convert script to bash. Ruby was less than reliable, due to the inability to predict where it was installed.

HURDLE: Binaries still referencing libs from Darwin Ports, instead of the libs we've bundled with the installer.

SOLUTION:

• Add NO_DARWIN_PORTS=1 to the top of the Makefile
• Put LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/git/lib,/usr/lib" in the arguments for each of the make commands

HURDLE: Package installer size was whopping 40MB download, and 89 MB to install:

SOLUTION:

• Converted the 80+ hardlinks (git-branch, git-remote, etc.) to symlinks. The OS X PackageMaker just doesn't respect hardlinks and was treating them all as individual duplicates of a file.
• Stripped binaries of debug symbols after compiling via "make strip"

CONCLUSION

Now, the package has worked very well on machines that don't have the developer tools installed. The download size is 3.6 MB (instead of the original 40 MB), and it takes 9 MB to install, instead of 87 MB. That's pretty great progress in my eyes! And considering the fact neither Geoff or I have built a package for OS X before, it's a reasonably great accomplishment.

There are a few minor glitches still happening:

• On some machines, it complains about not being able to create "/". This error does not mean git wasn't installed successfully, but it may mean that you need to download this script and run it manually, yourself. (or, set PATH and MANPATH in your environment to include /usr/local/git/bin and /usr/local/git/man, respectively)
• Unless you launch Git GUI from the shell, it fails on fetch / push / clone over the network. You can use the "Open in Git Gui" droplet to help overcome this.

posted by Tim Harper  # 7:51 AM