Re: Editing GSoC Project Ideas

From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 1, 2026, 22:18 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD2Q7gctwzGOe+rbgdXZSbDbV0dmM-cx4qt_d8nKi88=HA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <c67066fb-f857-4738-a3a2-53108c57456a@gmail.com>

Hi Phillip,

On Sun, Mar 1, 2026 at 3:26 PM Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

>
> I'd be very grateful if someone with write access could please update
> the description of "Refactoring in order to reduce Git’s global state"
> [1] to stop recommending moving settings from `environment.c` into
> `struct repository_settings`. That struct was originally added to hold
> config settings that were already lazily parsed. We've had a number of
> submissions that move eagerly parsed config settings into that struct
> where an invalid config setting causes git to start dying in unexpected
> places when the lazy parsing fails.

Yes, we should definitely update the description. Thanks for telling us about this.

> The current wording of the suggested microproject does not mention any
> of the subtleties involved which sets students up to fail. A better
> suggestion would be for them to look at what Bello Caleb Olamide has
> been doing in their Outreach project [2].

Yeah, I agree. We should suggest that.

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> I haven't been following Stolee's work [3] on "git conifg list --type"
> closely but I think it introduces some functions to parse config
> settings gently. Those functions might enable us to parse some config
> settings lazy where the functions using the lazily parsed settings are
> already set up to return a error. Doing that would require careful
> analysis and should not be a blanket recommendation.

I haven't followed Stolee's work either, but I will take a look. Thanks for the pointer.

In the meantime, if you have concrete suggestions for change you can submit one or more PRs to the https://github.com/git/git.github.io/ repo.

Thanks again anyway!