A new approach to Git's clone process for improved functionality | Maifee Ul Asad
- From
- Maifee Ul Asad <maifeeulasad@gmail.com>
- Date
- Mar 26, 2023, 14:55 UTC
- Message-ID
- <CANb2QxDUp_Lm+eYQM9x2OPzu10LCB2MBZamy2ehC6F03GdsDKw@mail.gmail.com>
Dear,
I am Maifee Ul Asad. I have been studying Git's codebase for a while now. And there is something I noticed about clone functionality. Whenever I run a clone operation it creates five independent processes. Now the only way to cancel this cloning operation is through CLI, press CTRL+C or a relevant command based on different OS. I have only checked in Windows.
But, when I am creating a wrapper, or I have some existing wrapper for Git, and I want to add functionality to cancel the cloning process, it can not be done so easily. Then I have to create a process and pass a signal interrupt via stdin of that process and cancel it.
I think it would be way cool and lot cleaner if we could create a parent process and add these processes as children to that parent process. In this case, we can simply use kill to terminate that parent process.
Till now I was only able to identify these operations, and I am pretty helpful they I have identified the correct functions: - perform the fetch operation - perform the receive-pack operation - perform the indexing operation - perform the pack-objects operation - perform the update-ref operation
Now we can simply wrap these with a fork (yes, we have to think about
NT not having a fork; and cygwin and other libraries may add tons of
load here) call. But here is my proposed pseudo code:
```
fork a new process
if (fork failed):
log and exit
else if (fork is successful):
perform the fetch operation
perform the receive-pack operation
perform the indexing operation
perform the pack-objects operation
perform the update-ref operation
else:
wait for the child processes to finish
```I think it would be a great improvement. And, I am really excited about the discussion we are going to have on this.
Regards Maifee Ul Asad