Implementing reftable in Git

Hi,

I might start working on implementing reftable in Git soon.

During the last Git Merge conference last March Stefan talked about reftable. In Alex Vandiver's notes [1] it is asked that people announce it on the list when they start working on it, and it appears that there is a reference implementation in JGit.

Looking it up, there is indeed some documentation [2], code [3], tests [4] and other related stuff [5] in the JGit repo. It looks like the JGit repo and the reftable code there are licensed under the Eclipse Distribution License - v 1.0 [7] which is very similar to the 3-Clause BSD License also called Modified BSD License which is GPL compatible according to gnu.org [9]. So from a quick look it appears that I should be able to port the JGit to Git if I just keep the copyright and license header comments in all the related files.

So I think the most straightforward and compatible way to do it would be to port the JGit implementation.

Thanks in advance for any suggestion or comment about this.

Reftable was first described by Shawn and then discussed last July on the list [6].

My work on this would be sponsored by Booking.com.

Thanks, Christian.

[1] https://public-inbox.org/git/alpine.DEB.2.20.1803091557510.23109@alexmv-linux/

[2] https://github.com/eclipse/jgit/blob/master/Documentation/technical/reftable.md

[3] https://github.com/eclipse/jgit/tree/master/org.eclipse.jgit/src/org/eclipse/jgit/internal/storage/reftable

[4] https://github.com/eclipse/jgit/tree/master/org.eclipse.jgit.test/tst/org/eclipse/jgit/internal/storage/reftable

[5] https://github.com/eclipse/jgit/tree/master/org.eclipse.jgit.pgm/src/org/eclipse/jgit/pgm/debug

[6] https://public-inbox.org/git/CAJo=hJtyof=HRy=2sLP0ng0uZ4=S-DpZ5dR1aF+VHVETKG20OQ@mail.gmail.com/

[7] http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/edl-v10.php

[8] https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause

[9] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ModifiedBSD