On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 10:04:48AM -0700, Jonathan Tan wrote: > > I'm happy to discuss possible projects if anybody has an idea but isn't > > sure how to develop it into a proposal. > > I'm new to Outreachy and programs like this, so does anyone have an > opinion on my draft proposal below? It does not have any immediate > user-facing benefit, but it does have a definite end point. > > Also let me know if an Outreachy proposal should have more detail, etc. > > Refactor "git index-pack" logic into library code > > Currently, whenever any Git code needs a pack to be indexed, it > needs to spawn a new "git index-pack" process, passing command-line > arguments and communicating with it using file descriptors (standard > input and output), much like an end-user would if invoking "git > index-pack" directly. Refactor the pack indexing logic into library > code callable from other Git code, make "git index-pack" a thin > wrapper around that library code, and (to demonstrate that the > refactoring works) change fetch-pack.c to use the library code > instead of spawning the "git index-pack" process. > > This allows the pack indexing code to communicate with its callers > with the full power of C (structs, callbacks, etc.) instead of being > restricted to command-line arguments and file descriptors. It also > simplifies debugging in that there will no longer be 2 > inter-communicating processes to deal with, only 1. I think this is an OK level of detail. I'm not sure quite sure about the goal of the project, though. In particular: - I'm not clear what we'd hope to gain. I.e., what richer information would we want to pass back and forth between index-pack and the other processes? It might also be more efficient, but I'm not sure it's measurably so (we save a single process, and we save some pipe traffic, but the sideband demuxer would probably end up passing it over a self-pipe anyway). - index-pack is prone to dying on bad input, and we wouldn't want it to take down the outer fetch-pack or receive-pack, which are what produce useful messages to the user. That's something that could be fixed as part of the libification, but I suspect the control flow might be a little tricky. - we don't always call index-pack, but sometimes call unpack-objects. I suppose we could continue to call an external unpack-objects in that path, but that eliminates the utility of having richer communication if we sometimes have to take the "dumb" path. A while ago I took a stab at teaching index-pack to unpack. It works, but there are a few ugly bits, as discussed in: https://github.com/peff/git/commit/7df82454a855281e9c147f3023225f8a6f72e303 Maybe that would be worth making part of the project? -Peff