1. In case you’re not aware what it is. It was introduced in JGit.
???Prefix table??
2. Gerrit team likes to get this in cgit
3. From the Stump the Experts yesterday, the question was “If you
could go back and change anything what would it be?”: Loose refs can
cause difficulties. So it would be nice to make reftables a first-class
citizen. There are issues with OSes with case-insensitive filesystems.
Reftables can help with this.
4. Stolee: contributing an entire copy of the source of a library
elsewhere as one patch makes it hard to review, and doesn’t feel like
a contribution to Git.
5. Brian: agree. Is it an external library that needs to be pulled in
every time a new version added in JGit.
6. Edward: having it as external library moves the maintenance burden
7. Jonathan N: example of xdiff, we have a copy, Mercurial has a copy,
and they have been patched in different ways. Can we separate these
concerns? One: patches that can be reviewed separately. Two: licensing.
Three: ongoing maintenance approach.
8. Peff: benefits of external library are clear. What is the maintenance
burden of not maintaining this in the core git tree. More concerned
about niceties in Git that aren’t in other libraries, like strbufs and
data structures. Lowest common denominator isn’t ideal. Can this cost
be mitigated?
9. Ed: I have the same concerns. We also have strbufs, but they are not
the same. We also might run into licensing issues.
10. Stolee: also cross platform compatibility… It might not perform
well on different platforms.
Peff: It feels to me there are a lot of hairy filesystem details
reftables need to do.
11. Brian: Atomic renames have issues on Windows.
12. Jonathan N: Han-Wen wanted a more substantial review, and we just
provided one (actionable for
13. Jonathan: write a summary email to Han-Wen)
14. Brian: (inaudible) Having a reftable library would be interesting to
test SHA256 changes.
15. Stolee: would be nice to have tests regarding case-sensitivity &
directory/file conflicts
16. Ed: wait, are we loosening the restriction?
17. Peff: no, for backwards-compatibility we cannot. Would love to get
rid of that restriction, though.
18. Jonathan N: Immediate benefit wrt D/F conflicts is being able to
keep reflogs for deleted branches