Re: [RFC PATCH 7/8] git-std-lib: introduce git standard library

[Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>]

Hi Calvin

On 28/06/2023 22:15, Calvin Wan wrote:
>> On 27/06/2023 20:52, Calvin Wan wrote:
>>> The Git Standard Library intends to serve as the foundational library
>>> and root dependency that other libraries in Git will be built off of.
>>> That is to say, suppose we have libraries X and Y; a user that wants to
>>> use X and Y would need to include X, Y, and this Git Standard Library.
>>
>> I think having a library of commonly used functions and structures is a
>> good idea. While I appreciate that we don't want to include everything
>> I'm surprised to see it does not include things like "hashmap.c" and
>> "string-list.c" that will be required by the config library as well as
>> other code in "libgit.a". I don't think we want "libgitconfig.a" and
>> "libgit.a" to both contain a copy of "hashmap.o" and "string-list.o"
> 
> I chose not to include hashmap and string-list in git-std-lib.a in the
> first pass since they can exist as libraries built on top of
> git-std-lib.a. There is no harm starting off with more libraries than
> fewer besides having something like the config library be dependent on
> lib-hashmap.a, lib-string-list.a, and git-std-lib.a rather than only
> git-std-lib.a. They can always be added into git-std-lib.a in the
> future. That being said, I do find it extremely unlikely that someone
> would want to swap out the implementation for hashmap or string-list
> so it is also very reasonable to include them into git-std-lib.a

Finding the right boundary for git-std-lib is a bit of a judgement call. 
We certainly could have separate libraries for things like hashmap, 
string-list, strvec, strmap and wildmatch but there is some overhead 
adding each one to the Makefile. I think their use is common enough that 
it would be continent to have them in git-std-lib but we can always add 
them later.

>>> diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
>>> index e9ad9f9ef1..255bd10b82 100644
>>> --- a/Makefile
>>> +++ b/Makefile
>>> @@ -2162,6 +2162,11 @@ ifdef FSMONITOR_OS_SETTINGS
>>>        COMPAT_OBJS += compat/fsmonitor/fsm-path-utils-$(FSMONITOR_OS_SETTINGS).o
>>>    endif
>>>
>>> +ifdef GIT_STD_LIB
>>> +     BASIC_CFLAGS += -DGIT_STD_LIB
>>> +     BASIC_CFLAGS += -DNO_GETTEXT
>>
>> I can see other projects may want to build git-std-lib without gettext
>> support but if we're going to use git-std-lib within git it needs to be
>> able to be built with that support. The same goes for the trace
>> functions that you are redefining in usage.h
> 
> Taking a closer look at gettext.[ch], I believe I can also include it
> into git-std-lib.a with a couple of minor changes.

That's great

> I'm currently
> thinking about how the trace functions should interact with
> git-std-lib.a since Victoria had similar comments on patch 1. I'll
> reply to that thread when I come up with an answer.

One thought I had was to have a compile time flag so someone building 
git-std-lib for an external project could build it with

	make git-std-lib NO_TRACE2=YesPlease

and then we'd either compile against a stub version of trace2 that does 
nothing or use some #define magic to get rid of the calls if that is not 
too invasive.

Best Wishes

Phillip