Git on old Macs

[DamienIrving]

This blog post talks about the problem participants often have using git on older Mac laptops. It offers this site as a solution, which is an archive of older versions git. I'm thinking we need a short guidance document to provide some instructions on how to use that repository of old Git versions. For instance, which versions match up with which releases of Mac OS X? What do you do with one of the files once you've download it?

[jiffyclub]

Those appear to be archives of the Git source code, which isn't going to work for us. Maybe this page of downloads? http://sourceforge.net/projects/git-osx-installer/files/

[DamienIrving]

It seems the latest version of the workshop-template give the right information:

For OS X 10.8 and higher, install Git for Mac by downloading and running the installer. After installing Git, there will not be anything in your /Applications folder, as Git is a command line program. For older versions of OS X (10.5-10.7) use the most recent available installer for your OS available here. Use the Leopard installer for 10.5 and the Snow Leopard installer for 10.6-10.7.

Couple of things:

• Can anyone confirm that this works for older Macs?
• Users of newer Macs shouldn't actually need to install anything at all, right? It comes pre-installed. I'm thinking the instructors should be modified to reflect this.

[jiffyclub]

Both yes and no on that last point. /usr/bin/git exists in 10.9+, but the
first time you use it you have to agree to the Xcode terms and it might
actually download the developer tools then? (I could be wrong on specifics
here, but I dunno how to test...)
On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 2:51 PM Damien Irving notifications@github.com
wrote:

It seems the latest version of the workshop-template
https://github.com/swcarpentry/workshop-template give the right
information:

For OS X 10.8 and higher, install Git for Mac by downloading and
running the installer
http://sourceforge.net/projects/git-osx-installer/files/latest/download.
After installing Git, there will not be anything in your /Applications
folder, as Git is a command line program. For older versions of OS X
(10.5-10.7) use the most recent available installer for your OS
available here http://sourceforge.net/projects/git-osx-installer/files/.
Use the Leopard installer for 10.5 and the Snow Leopard installer for
10.6-10.7.

Couple of things:

• Can anyone confirm that this works for older Macs?
• Users of newer Macs shouldn't actually need to install anything at
  all, right? It comes pre-installed. I'm thinking the instructors should be
  modified to reflect this.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#32 (comment)
.

[jiffyclub]

Does anyone know if the git-osx-installers add /usr/local/git/bin to the user's PATH, or must that be done manually?

[jiffyclub]

I just installed from http://sourceforge.net/projects/git-osx-installer/files/ and it installs to /usr/local/git, but it doesn't seem to modify your PATH, so users may have to do this manually. I also found that OS X didn't want to open the installer because it doesn't come from a trusted developer, you have to do the right-click > Open trick. So those are some things we might need to note. Other people have experience with that?

[andreabedini]

The common way to install software on OSX is to use homebrew, I think it supports older versions of OSX too but I need to verify. That would be the perfect solution because with the same tool you can install also python, r, and whatever, there's heaps of packages.

[jiffyclub]

Most of our students do not know how to use the shell before our workshops, so installing things via homebrew is a bit much to ask of them.

[ethanwhite]

Most of our students do not know how to use the shell before our workshops, so installing things via homebrew is a bit much to ask of them.

Agreed.

[andreabedini]

@jiffyclub @ethanwhite I understand, but I thought the problem was that the students had to fix their PATH, which is even worse.

[jiffyclub]

At this point I really don't have a clear enough picture about what exactly people with versions of OS X older than 10.8 have to do. Unless someone here has access to a computer running 10.6-7 and can test things, we may have to wait until someone brings in a complete report from a workshop.

[andreabedini]

@jiffyclub I might have some old macs in my lab, I'll do some tests and report back (be aware that my report could include "please upgrade" :-))

[jiffyclub]

That'd be great, especially if they are really fresh. E.g., don't have Xcode or any command line tools or anything else installed.

I really wish everyone would upgrade to at least a semi-recent OS, but sadly it's not an option at a workshop or with some managed equipment.

[jduckles]

On older mac homebrew requires a ~2GB download of XCode to just get started with homebrew, not gonna happen with shaky wifi. As @DamienIrving mentions this was fixed in the carpentries/workshop-template#134 and confirmed to work at a workshop in January.

[jduckles]

@jiffyclub, the user I installed it for was able to use it with no PATH modification, I've had to do this a couple of times in the past and I don't recall modifying PATH's.

[jiffyclub]

@jduckles, thanks for the report! We can probably close this, then.

[jduckles]

@jiffyclub Agreed, stick with the sourceforge links, not the kernel.org tarballs.

[iglpdc]

Good. I've updated the wiki at the workshop-template repo to reflect this.