Re: Libification project (SoC)

From: Steve Frécinaux <nudrema@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 16, 2007, 18:22 UTC
Message-ID: <1174069353.2599.13.camel@mejai>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.83.0703161218140.5518@xanadu.home>

On Fri, 2007-03-16 at 12:26 -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

> Sure.  But the output from an executable is a damn good abstraction and 
> the executable itself is an impenetrable boundary.  Anything can change 
> (and did change) underneath.

Strictly speaking, you can use opaque structures for commits and so on (so that the outside world will only ever see a pointer), and use some getter/setters for commonly used stuffs (like datum, title, content).

Also, I guess what people would expect from a C library is roughly the same as for the current plumbing... just easier to use from another program. It doesn't need a low-level access to data structure (most applications would be to interact with an existing repo or to store data for a third-party software, something that is high-level) and I don't think such an opaque API would be a huge constraint as soon as you keep the Object/Index/Tree/Commit/etc basic opaque structs.