Comment by mr_mitm

13 hours ago

Why stop at `git clone`? Why not include `apt install git` and equivalents for all OSs?

Whenever I write documentation, my first step is to explain how silicon can be used as a transistor.

  • Yeah well I produce home grown silicon in super novae.

    'If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.'

  • I used to think it was a struggle to walk the user through introductory EM physics.

    But, it turns out that was a walk in the park compared to explaining how to acquire and isolate the dopants, not to mention building up the pure silicon wafers.

If Windows/MacOS doesn't ship git by default, then yes, that should be included. On Linux, the people who are running Linux From Scratch can probably infer what the problem is.

  • I don't know about these days, but at some point neither Debian or Ubuntu Server shipped with Git. You can still find tutorials that start with apt-get update and apt-get install git-core

In my company that comes be default. Also, `git clone` helpfully includes a canonical path to the repository, in case you found the README laying around somewhere.

Otherwise, yes, I would include apt install for the dependencies, which is also incredibly valuable to make explicit. The only tricky part is what package manager to reference.