packaging gitolite

Gitolite has broad similarities to git in terms of packaging requirements.

  • Git has 150 executables to marshal and put somewhere. Gitolite has the directories commands, lib, syntactic-sugar, triggers, and VREF.

    It doesn't matter what this directory is. As an example, Fedora keeps git's 150 executables in /usr/libexec/git-core, so /usr/libexec/gitolite may be a good choice; it's upto you.

    The rest of this section will assume you chose /usr/libexec/gitolite as the location, and that this location contains the 5 directories named above.

  • Git has the GIT_EXEC_PATH env var to point to this directory. Gitolite has GL_BINDIR. However, in git, the "make" process embeds a suitable default into the binary, making the env var optional.

With that said, here's one way to package gitolite:

  • Put the executable gitolite somewhere in PATH. Put the executable gitolite-shell in /usr/libexec/gitolite (along with those 5 directories).

    Change the 2 assignments to $ENV{GL_BINDIR}, one in 'gitolite', one in 'gitolite-shell', to "/usr/libexec/gitolite" from $FindBin::RealBin. This is equivalent to "make" embedding the exec-path into the executable.

    OR

    Put both executables gitolite and gitolite-shell also into /usr/libexec/gitolite (i.e., as siblings to the 5 directories mentioned above). Then symlink /usr/libexec/gitolite/gitolite to some directory in the PATH. Do not copy it; it must be a symlink.

    Gitolite will find the exec-path by following the symlink.

  • The Gitolite subdirectory in /usr/libexec/gitolite/lib can stay right there, OR, if your distro policies don't allow that, can be put in any directory in perl's @INC path (such as /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl).

  • Finally, a file called /usr/libexec/gitolite/VERSION must contain a suitable version string.