Notes from the Git Contributors' Summit 2021, virtual, Oct 19/20

Team,

we held our second all-virtual Summit over the past two days. It was the traditional unconference style meeting, with topics being proposed and voted on right before the introduction round. It was really good to see the human faces behind those email addresses.

32 contributors participated, and we spanned the timezones from PST to IST. To make that possible, the event took place on two days, from 1500-1900 UTC, which meant that the attendees from the US West coast had to get up really early, while it was past midnight in India at the end.

I would like to thank all participants for accommodating the time, and in particular for creating such a friendly, collaborative atmosphere.

A particular shout-out to Jonathan Nieder, Emily Shaffer and Derrick Stolee for taking notes. I am going to send out these notes in per-topic subthreads, replying to this mail.

Day 1 topics:

* Crazy (and not so crazy) ideas
* SHA-256 Updates
* Server-side merge/rebase: needs and wants?
* Submodules and how to make them worth using
* Sparse checkout behavior and plans

Day 2 topics:

* The state of getting a reftable backend working in git.git
* Documentation (translations, FAQ updates, new user-focused, general
  improvements, etc.)
* Let's have public Git chalk talks
* Increasing diversity & inclusion (transition to `main`, etc)
* Improving Git UX
* Improving reviewer quality of life (patchwork, subsystem lists?, etc)

A few topics were left for a later date (maybe as public Git chalk talks):

* Making Git memory-leak free (already landed patches)
* Scaling Git
* Scaling ref advertisements
* Config-based hooks (and getting there via migration ot hook.[ch] lib &
  "git hook run")
* Make git [clone|fetch] support pre-seeding via downloaded *.bundle files

Ciao, Johannes