Re: Why does make run git?

[Radon Rosborough]

> It seems fundamentally unmodular for building Emacs from sources
> to concern itself in any way with how you got those sources.

But there are also .dir-locals.el files in the source tree. It seems
equally unmodular for building Emacs from sources to concern itself in
any way with how you edit those sources. It just so happens that
configuring Git can't be done by including files in the source tree
(for security reasons); it has to be done by running Git commands.

If your reaction to the .dir-locals.el argument is "but obviously it
makes sense for Emacs' source tree to have particular support for
Emacs, since that is the software it is building", then I would say it
makes equal sense for Emacs' source tree to have particular support
for Git, since that is the version-control system it is using. Much
like people include Travis configuration files, Docker configuration
files, and—well—.gitignore and .gitattributes files in their source
tree.

IMO, it's really not worth it to aspire to complete modularity if that
comes at the cost of significant practical inconvenience.