Re: [PATCH 00/38] Virtualization of the refs API

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 10, 2016, 15:09 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8CNJfQxnn94b=+mjfPVvNzJu3sD3w_g8yCUHY0UQCbfLQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <cover.1464983301.git.mhagger@alum.mit.edu>

On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 11:03 PM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> Since the that ref-iterator [1] changes seem to have gotten a positive
> reception, let's try to keep up the momentum. I hope I'm not
> overloading the review pipeline...
>
> I think all of the groundwork is in place now to virtualize the refs
> API. This will open the way to storing refs in ways other than the
> familiar loose refs / packed refs format, such as David Turner's
> proposed LMDB-based storage [2].
>
> This is a long patch series, but most of the patches are pretty simple
> and formulaic. The goal is to implement a `ref_store`. In the language
> of object-oriented programming, `ref_store` is an abstract base class
> representing a reference storage backend. It provides methods to read,
> write, and delete references and symrefs, and to iterate over
> references, reflogs, and reflog entries, plus a number of other
> things—19 methods in all.

I probably don't know what I'm talking about because I don't follow your work closely enough. Please ignore if this is nonsense. But if we extend/change API, we might need to update git-for-each-ref too, to expose it to shell scripts and external commands. I guess for iteration there's nothing else more needed, but we may need to introduction new options for the storage thing, e.g. to select storage...

-- 
Duy