These patches are not intended to be complete, not by any stretch of imagination. They are just enough to get the CI run to pass, even in the Windows-specific parts. As I mentioned elsewhere, I would much prefer for hn/reftable to not re-invent get_be*(), struct strbuf, struct string_list, struct lock_file etc. However, in the context of the test failures, I do not think that this would have made a big difference. Apart from the unportable constructs, and from the "delete/rename while there is still a handle on the file" issues, it would appear that one big reason why it was so hard to debug and fix the test is the recursive complexity of the data structures. To elaborate on that: struct reftable_stack has an attribute called merged that has an array of struct reftable_reader * (confusingly called "stack"). Each of these readers has an attribute of type struct reftable_block_source that uses a vtable and an opaque pointer to abstract three types of block sources: file, slice (which is apparently unused, i.e. it is apparently just dead weight for now) and malloc. I am not sure that this abstraction fest serves us well here. Quite honestly, I would have expected the packed_git data structure to be imitated more closely, as it strikes me as similar in purpose, and it has seen a ton of testing over the past decade and a half. I could not recognize that design in the reftable, though. It is quite obvious, of course, that the code tries to imitate the object-oriented nature of the Go code, but it seems quite obvious from my difficulties to address the problem where stack_compact_range() would try to delete stale reftable files (without even so much as a warning when the files could not be deleted!) without releasing all file handles to all reftable files, even the ones that do not need to be deleted. To be smarter about this, the code has to know more about the nature of the block source than the abstraction layer suggests. It has to know that a block source refers to a file, and that that file is marked for deletion. My heavy-handed work-around, even if it works, is not really a good solution, but it is a testament that there is a lot of opportunity to simplify the code drastically while at the same time simplifying the design, too. I know you have been putting a lot of effort into this library, so I feel a bit bad about saying the following: The hn/reftable patches will need substantial work before we can merge it with confidence. Part of the reason why it is so hard to review the reftable patches is that they intentionally refuse to integrate well within Git's source code, such as (re-)implementing its own fundamental data structures, intentionally using a totally different coding style, and it concerns me that the stated requirement for bug fixes is to treat Git's source code as a downstream of the actual project. I am not too bad a C developer and would consider myself competent in debugging issues, even hard ones, in Git, and yet... it was really hard to wade through the layers of abstraction to figure out where the file handles should be closed that were opened and prevented deleting/renaming files. At this point, I don't feel that it makes sense to keep insisting on having this in a separate library. The only other user of that library will be libgit2, and I really think that given libgit2's heritage, it won't be a problem to adapt the code after it stabilized in git.git (and since libgit2 treats git.git as upstream for the libxdiff code, it won't be a problem to do the same for the reftable code, too). I believe that the best course of action is to reuse the data structures libgit.a provides, and to delete the re-implementations in reftable/. Only then can we start working effectively on refactoring the code to simplify the data structures in order to clarify resource usage (which was the root cause for the bugs I fixed, although I am sure that there are way more lurking in there, hidden by the fact that the code is not covered thoroughly by our tests). Johannes Schindelin (6): fixup! Add reftable library fixup! Add reftable library fixup! Add reftable library fixup! Add reftable library fixup! Add reftable library vcxproj: adjust for the reftable changes config.mak.uname | 2 +- contrib/buildsystems/Generators/Vcxproj.pm | 11 ++++++++++- reftable/record.c | 2 +- reftable/stack.c | 17 +++++++++++++++-- 4 files changed, 27 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) base-commit: 1b749f9d62f2c8b5a8e91f382d2be14902459cba Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-623%2Fdscho%2Freftable-on-windows-v1 Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-623/dscho/reftable-on-windows-v1 Pull-Request: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/623 -- gitgitgadget
