Re: Libification project (SoC)

["Marco Costalba" <mcostalba@gmail.com>]

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.

> 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