Re: libgit2 status

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 26, 2012, 18:28 UTC
Message-ID: <7vharpv77n.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <5038A148.4020003@op5.se>

Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> writes:

> Politically, I'm not sure how keen the git community is on handing
> over control to the core stuff of git to a commercial entity, but it
> doesn't seem to be a dying project, so I'd say go ahead and do it.

I do not think commercial-ness of any entity comes into the picture.

The only three things that matter are license compatibility (I think libgit2 licensed under GPLv2 + linkage exception is doing just fine in that department), maturity and quality of it (it is in early development phase), and the openness of the development process (it could do better by finding ways to better interact with the mainstream git development discussion that happens here in the longer term).

And the last one should really be a "longer term" item. It is more important for its codebase to get mature and robust, and that can only happen by various projects and products (e.g. GitHub for Mac) using it to improve it. I do not think "subtree" (or anything in contrib/ for that matter) is part of "the core stuff of git", and do not see a problem; such a move may help both subtree and libgit2.

Over a much longer timeperiod, I wouldn't be surprised if some "core stuff" gets reimplemented on top of libgit2 and distributed as part of the git-core.

There will be substantial integration and logistics hassles ahead of us before that can happen, though. E.g. we could point at libgit2 as our submodule, but that is not the only way to make git depend on libgit2; it could just be a Build-Depends like we depend on libz. Looking at the build dependency of libgit2 itself, I do not think tighter integration of the libgit2 itself into the git-core is not likely to happen very soon, and also is not necessarily a good thing to do.