Re: About GIT Internals

From: Konstantin Khomoutov <kostix@bswap.ru>
Date: Jun 3, 2022, 15:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20220603152301.olqbjtt5j2kqyc3e@carbon>
In-Reply-To: <CACMKQb3_j+iFcf5trZEcWoU7vAsscKv+_sLaEqg_qfazBPTo+Q@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Jun 03, 2022 at 05:48:14PM +0530, Aman wrote:

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> Though I may understand the internal design and high-level
> implementation of GIT, I really want to know how it's implemented and
> was made, which means reading the SOURCE CODE.
> 
> 1. I don't know how absurd of a quest this is, please enlighten me.
> 2. How do I do it? Where do I start? It's such a BIG repository - and
> I am not guessing it's going to be easy.
> 3. Would someone advise, perhaps, to have a look at an older version
> of the source code? rather than the latest one, for some reason.

Well, depends on what you mean when talking about the two mentioned designs. I mean, there's the design of the approach to manage data and there's the design of the software package (which Git is).

If you do also understand the latter - that is, understanding that Git is an assortment of CLI tools combined into two layers called "plumbing" and "porcelain", - then you should have no difficulty starting to read the code: basically locate the source code of the entry point Git binary (which is, well, "git", or "git.exe" on Windows) and start reading it. You'll find it parses its command-line arguments and calls out to other executable modules which are parts of the Git software package to do heavy lifting. You then read the source code of the packages of interest, and so on and so on. I'm not sure there could be any other "guide" to read the source code.

If you're not familiar with the design of Git-as-a-software-package, it's probably time to clone the Git repository and explore the contents of the directory named "Documentation" there.