On 5/18/2017 7:21 PM, Brandon Williams wrote:
When I first started working on the git project I found it very difficult to understand parts of the code base because of the inherently global nature of our code. It also made working on submodules very difficult. Since we can only open up a single repository per process, you need to launch a child process in order to process a submodule. But you also need to be able to communicate other stateful information to the children processes so that the submodules know how best to format their output or match against a pathspec...it ends up feeling like layering on hack after hack. What I would really like to do, is to have the ability to have a repository object so that I can open a submodule in-process. Before this becomes a reality for all commands, much of the library code would need to be refactored in order to work purely on handles instead of global state. As it turned out, ls-files is a pretty simple command and doesn't have *too* many dependencies. The biggest thing that needed to be changed was piping through an index into a couple library routines so that they don't inherently rely on 'the_index'. A few of these changes I've sent out and can be found at 'origin/bw/pathspec-sans-the-index' and 'origin/bw/dir-c-stops-relying-on-the-index' which this series is based on. Patches 1-16 are refactorings to prepare either library code or ls-files itself to be ready to handle passing around an index struct. Patches 17-22 introduce a repository struct and change a couple of things about how submodule caches work (getting submodule information from .gitmodules). And Patch 23 converts ls-files to use a repository struct. The most interesting part of the series is from 17-23. And 1-16 could be taken as is without the rest of the series. This is still very much in a WIP state, though it does pass all tests. What I'm hoping for here is to get a discussion started about the feasibility of a change like this and hopefully to get the ball rolling. Is this a direction we want to move in? Is it worth the pain? Thanks for taking the time to look at this and entertain my insane ideas :)
Very nice and thanks for starting this. Jeff
