Re: [OUTREACHY V2] Unify ref-filter formats with other --pretty formats[proposal]

[Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>]

Hi ZheNing and Wilberforce,

On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:26 PM ZheNing Hu <adlternative@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hariom verma <hariom18599@gmail.com> 于2022年10月28日周五 16:08写道：

> > > Olga<olyatelezhnaya@gmail.com> has done great work in “Unifying Git’s
> > > format languages” during Outreachy Round 15 and continued even after
> > > that [from 28-09-2017 to 04-04-2019]. Her work is mostly related to
> > > `cat-file` and `ref-filter`.
> > >
> > > She already did a pretty nice job in preparing ref-filter for more
> > > general usage of its formatting logic. It will give me the possibility
> > > to make the migration of pretty.c easier.
> >
> > ZheNing Hu continued the Olga's work during GSoC'21. You can tell a
> > bit more about that too.
>
> I'm afraid I'm skeptical about the progress of this project. Yes, this
> project has
> been going on for too long, probably 3 years, and it is long overdue
> to be merged
> into master. Maybe we all need to rethink the nature of this project instead of
> rushing to start writing code.
>
> As far as I know, these unified format refactor are easy to implement, but as we
> use more complex parsing logic, there will be a lot of performance degradation.
>
> I recommend new contributors to perform performance analysis and performance
> optimization directly based on the original developer's patches.

Yeah, I agree that the project to use ref-filter formats in cat-file
is very hard due to performance issues, and I think we shouldn't
suggest it anymore as a project to GSoC or Outreachy applicants.

The project we are proposing for Outreachy, and that Wilberforce is
writing a proposal for, is about unifying "ref-filter formats" with
"pretty formats" though. So there is no need to touch cat-file code as
"pretty formats" are not used there. Actually it might not even be
needed to mention using ref-filter formats in cat-file (and the
related work made by Olga and ZheNing on this). It could perhaps help
with understanding the big picture, but that's it.

Thanks,
Christian.