Re: Dropping Git.pm (at least Git.xs)?

From: Dennis Stosberg <dennis@stosberg.net>
Date: Sep 3, 2006, 15:03 UTC
Message-ID: <20060903150305.G50c94aea@leonov.stosberg.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vodtxuqt4.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> In the ideal world in admittably not so immediate future, I
> would rather have a honestly libified git that encapsulates

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Show 8 quoted lines

>  - I think the clean-up promise of Git.pm is great (e.g.
>    safe_qx should be part of it not in git-svn alone).
> 
>  - I think Git.xs was a bit premature and raised the hurdle of
>    cleaning up and consolidating various core-wrappers from
>    existing Perl scripts into Git.pm and have them use Git.pm.
>    It would be nice if we can drop this part for now, and do a
>    bit more Perl-level clean-up first.

Having perl bindings to git internals and sometime in the future to a libified git is a great thing. It will allow people to do interesting things, quickly trying concepts without having to write any C code. And I expect that gitweb can be sped up remarkably by using Git.pm (no forking, parsing of command output often not necessary, easy caching of frequently cached data across calls, etc)

So I think there are valid uses for Git.pm.

On the other hand there are the problems Junio mentioned. And the portability issues wit Git.pm:

 - Git has to be built with the same compiler perl was built with,
   which is a problem on many Solaris machines.
 - We need to generate position-independent code on some archs, but
   have no proper way to determine on which systems it is really
   necessary. 
 - It completely breaks cross-compiling.

And the gain is negligible at the moment: There are only two users left: git-annotate and git-send-email. The first one has already been superseded by git-blame and the second one can easily be converted back.

I think Git.pm would be a good candidate for the contrib section if there is someone who keeps it up-to-date through the coming changes. The only thing that would have to be kept in the main Makefile is the option to generate position-independent code, defaulting to off.

Regards, Dennis

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