Re: Libification project (SoC)

From: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 17, 2007, 07:04 UTC
Message-ID: <e5bfff550703170004n3ab9075euf66a9e6dd56040d7@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0703170014130.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

On 3/17/07, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

>
> We are talking about libgit. Which should make access to certain common
> functions on Git repositories easy. Nothing more than that.
>

Fair enough.

Show 11 quoted lines

> If you need to do that asynchronously, do _not_ fiddle with libgit. Just
> imagine what this would involve: you'd have to have timeouts (since there
> is _NO_ other way to find out when to return with empty hands, instead of
> blocking), which is _not_ portable. You'd soon be in the same _mess_ we
> are talking about with respect to exceptions.
>
> Also, you would make _all_ operations expensive, since they _would_ have
> to store state to be restartable.
>
> The common solution for your problem _is_ to use threads.
>

I would say, the common solution to have non blocking libgit is to use threads in the tool linked with libgit.

This is clearly a design choice and I agree it's an important statement to keep libgit simple and portable (otherwise you'd probably need to use a thread library as pthread in libgit). Thread facility in Qt is instead already portable and well integrated. Anyway it's a design choice perhaps worth documenting.

> And you have to admit that _only_ viewers would need asynchronous access
> anyway. I doubt that other tools -- which could take their advantage of a
> libgit -- would need such an access.
>

Yes, and you have to admit ;-) that viewers are the tools that mostly will use libgit.

    Marco