script/plugin install git://whatever does nothing

Updated to latest git from git-scm.com, and Rails 2.3.5, and it still fails.

The reason is that it appears rails-2.3.5/lib/commands/plugin.rb is trying use git pull to grab the plugin code (see the install_using_git method), which doesn't work right.

Example: script/plugin install git://github.com/fesplugas/typus.git

mkdir vendor/plugins/typus
cd vendor/plugins/typus
git init
git pull --depth 1 git://github.com/fesplugas/typus.git

That last line exits 1, but that error is being masked by the install_using_git method, and the directory is just rm -rf'ed.

I'm not sure the reasoning behind git init then git pull since a simple git clone works:

cd vendor/plugins
git clone -q git://github.com/fesplugas/typus.git

The following patch to the install_using_git method fixes the issue.

I also tested using a template, which now works: rails typustest -m http://gist.github.com/86613.txt

Sorry, but I can't reproduce this problem on both 2.3.5 and master

I don't really know why they were doing init and pull, but doing so will leave you with plugin which not on any branch, and not tracking the remote.

Thanks Nate, that seems like a valid problem to me. The generator moved in rails3 and your patch won't apply.
Give me some time to review the different options and make sure we cover all cases (like trying to install to update a plugin from a got repo) and even maybe ping some git experts to see what they think.

• Matt

I've tried my best, Nate. I spent a whole day of my time building an ubuntu 9.10 VM, and then install Git 1.5.6 on it. Sorry, but I couldn't reproduce your problem.

Here's my output:

sikachu@sikachu-ubuntu:~$ cd blog
sikachu@sikachu-ubuntu:~/blog$ git --version
git version 1.5.6
sikachu@sikachu-ubuntu:~/blog$ which git
/usr/local/bin/git
sikachu@sikachu-ubuntu:~/blog$ uname -a
Linux sikachu-ubuntu 2.6.31-14-server #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 16 15:07:34 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux
sikachu@sikachu-ubuntu:~/blog$ script/plugin install git://github.com/fesplugas/typus.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/sikachu/blog/vendor/plugins/typus/.git/
warning: no common commits
remote: Counting objects: 297, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (254/254), done.
remote: Total 297 (delta 23), reused 155 (delta 3)
Receiving objects: 100% (297/297), 155.98 KiB | 35 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (23/23), done.
From git://github.com/fesplugas/typus
 * branch            HEAD       -> FETCH_HEAD
sikachu@sikachu-ubuntu:~/blog$ ls -la vendor/plugins/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 sikachu sikachu 4096 2010-02-06 22:36 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 sikachu sikachu 4096 2010-02-06 21:29 ..
drwxr-xr-x 9 sikachu sikachu 4096 2010-02-06 22:36 typus

I also tried using your template, and it also installed fine.

From your suggestion, if you change git init; git pull combination to git clone, it will break the ability to specify a revision you want to fetch since git clone doesn't support it.

However, to update the documentation of something is always useful. Could you resubmit the patch to update the documentation? Git looks like a black box to me, and I don't know that there's a way to debug what's going on and made your installation fail.

[bulk edit]