Re: [PATCH v2 00/16] reftable: overhaul the API to expose access to blocks

> Hi,
> 
> this patch series is a bigger overhaul of the reftable API. This
> overhaul has two main motivations:
> 
>   - The reftable library is now standalone and can be used by code bases
>     other than Git, like libgit2. This patch series thus renames a
>     couple of subsystems to have more intuitive names before we gain any
>     new users.
> 
>   - Some of the data of reftables isn't accessible at all via public
>     interfaces. Most importantly, it is not possible to access
>     individual blocks in a table. While users shouldn't need that access
>     most of the time, an upcoming usecase that Git itself has is to
>     implement consistency checks for the reftable backend. Here we'll
>     want to read through blocks and their respective records one by one
>     to ensure that they are sane and then iterate through records
>     contained in these blocks.
> 
> The patch series is structured as follows:
> 
>   - Patch 1 is a trivial global refactoring to fix formatting of the
>     license headers. They have been annoying me for far too long.
> 
>   - Patches 2 to 8 consolidate and rename a couple of data structures:
> 
>       - `reftable_reader` becomes `reftable_table`, as it is used to
>         access an individual table.
> 
>       - `reftable_block` becomes `reftable_block_data`, as it is only a
>         simple container for the underlying bytes.
> 
>       - `reftable_block_reader` becomes `reftable_block`, as it is used
>         to access an individual block.
> 
>     Overall, the data structures are now called after what they provide
>     access to compared to the rather generic previous names. This is
>     also in line with other data structures like `reftable_merged_table`
>     and `reftable_stack`.
> 
>   - Patches 9 to 13 refactor the block interface so that it can expose a
>     generic `reftable_iterator`, granting generic access to all of its
>     contained records.
> 
>   - Patches 14 to 16 refactor the table interface to expose a new
>     iterator over its contained blocks.
> 
>   - Patch 17 refactors `reftable_table_print_blocks` to be implemented
>     on top of these new iterators. This allows us to move it out of the
>     library codebase into the test helper.
> 
> The series is built on Git v2.49.0 with ps/reftable-sans-compat-util at
> 8f6a2dbe340 (Makefile: skip reftable library for Coccinelle, 2025-02-18)
> merged into it.
> 
> Changes in v2:
>   - Rename `reftable_table_init_table_iterator()` to
>     `reftable_table_iterator_init()`.
>   - Rename `struct reftable_block_reader::block` to `block_data`.
>   - Several improvements to commit messages.
>   - Drop unneeded calls to `block_iter_seek_start()` after
>     `block_iter_init()`.
>   - Fix -Wcomma error.
>   - Link to v1: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250331-pks-reftable-polishing-v1-0-ebed5247434c@pks.im
>