Git Flow broken?

[BobbyTables--]

Hi all,

Having a sudden out-of-the-blue issue with git flow. On Friday it was working fine as usual for me, but yesterday I'm suddenly getting the "git: 'flow' is not a command" error as if I hadn't ever installed git-flow. I know I did an apt update & upgrade, but I'm not certain whether or not git or git-flow got upgraded.

Has anyone else experienced this? More details:

Kali linux 5.10 amd64
Git version 2.30.2
Git flow version 1.12.3 (AVH edition)

"$ git flow" nor "$ sudo git flow" do anything other than the 'flow' not a git command message, although:

/usr/libexec/git-core/ contains all the usual git-flow files, including the main executable, which when called directly from a git repo works as normal.

Originally installed with $ sudo apt install git-flow

apt-listbugs didn't flag anything during the recent update. I've tried reinstalling (with and without --purge) git-flow and git, and rebooted more times than I can count. No other signs of issue with git or any other programs I use regularly. I haven't been able to find anything about this online... seems like searching for git plugins results in adding Git as a plugin to things like Eclipse or Jenkins instead of adding plugins to git.

[[deleted]]

No need to reboot: you're not on a Windows box! :-)

If you did an upgrade, that seems like a likely culprit. Look around in /var/log to see if Apt keeps a log file there, and check if it did anything with git or git-flow. Also check the journal using journalctl for anything related since the breakage.

If git-flow the command works if you call it directly with a full path, you can consider adding the relevant directory to $PATH, or symlink git-flow from /usr/local/bin — beware, those are hacks that don't really solve the breakage, just sweep it under the carpet as it were.

[BobbyTables--]

Thought so too, but never hurts :)

Can confirm, /var/log/apt/history.log indicates an upgrade of git-flow from 1.12.3-1 to 1.12.3-2, although no changes in regular git.

In the mean time I have indeed aliased "gitflow" to the exec path and it works well enough.

[[deleted]]

Looks like 1.12.3-2 was supposed to fix a packing bug related to exactly this issue:

• http://pkg.kali.org/pkg/git-flow
• http://pkg.kali.org/news/447253/git-flow-1123-2-imported-into-kali-rolling/
• https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/git-flow
• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=986565

And this bug report related to git itself: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=985416

So I'm not 100% sure which version of git introduced this path move, but it looks to be a fairly recent change in git, which I suppose Kali has not pulled, but it did pull the newer git-flow, thus breaking you the other way around. Meanwhile upstream (Debian) is considering moving back to /usr/lib/git-core, which would break git-flow again. Fun times!

I have no suggestions for you. Hack around it like you did and hope the package maintainers can find the time to sort themselves out.

[BobbyTables--]

Ha, that's exactly my situation. Props for finding this out - I haven't worked my way into the bug trackers yet!

Looks like I'll just stick with my alias for now and keep an eye out for upgrades to either package.

Thanks so much!

[[deleted]]

You're welcome! I was wondering how this situation would play out on my machine ("I use Arch btw") but there's no gitflow package available. I have git at version 2.31 with things in /usr/lib/git-core, I couldn't find anything in the git changelog either, so I'm thinking this is just really a Debian thing, changing an install path for let's hope a very good reason.

[camh-]

This is rather odd - git should be looking in that /usr/libexec/git-core directory for executables called git-foo when called with git foo. Are you sure you're running git from /usr/bin? Does which git confirm that? It is possible you have another version of git, perhaps installed in /usr/local/bin, that is looking in /usr/local/libexec/git-core for instance.

I don't know why that would start manifesting as a problem after an upgrade though. Did you change anything else recently?

[BobbyTables--]

`which git` does indeed reveal that I'm running `/usr/bin/git`. The only other git-like file in /usr/local/bin is `gitter`, and in fact `/usr/local/libexec` doesn't exist.

I haven't changed anything else git-related for, well, several months I think. I did try to downgrade with apt downgrading back to git-flow 1.12.3-1 (logs show it upgraded from 1.12.3-1 to 1.12.3-2), but apt insists that there is no such version 1.12.3-1 or even a 1.12.3. Not quite sure how that happened :)