Re: [PATCH] Make "git reset" a builtin. (incomplete)

On 8/22/07, David Kastrup [off-list ref] wrote:

Andreas Ericsson [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

David Kastrup wrote:

quoted

Carlos Rica [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

This is the first version of the program "builtin-reset.c",
intended for replacing the script "git-reset.sh".

The --mixed option with -- paths is not implemented yet.

The tests I made for it are not finished so they are not included,
but it seems to pass the rest of the test suite.

Could you be so kind as to give a one-sentence summary what the
benefits over using a shell script would be?

One word: Portability.

There's a plethora of various shell syntaxes. Discerning what's
correct shell and what's a bash'ism that may or may not be posixly
correct (but perhaps not supported on a multitude of out-of-the-box
solaris system) has so far taken almost as much time as convincing
newcomers to git that there really is no point in tracking file
renames explicitly.

Otoh, the list of large and renowned projects that have shunned git
for its weak windows support grows longer, meaning we potentially
lose competent programmers simply because they're forced to use
something else.

The problem I see is that C sucks really really bad as a scripting
language, and tying together plumbing functionality into porcelain is
one of the most powerful, flexible and hack-friendly features of git.
Deprecating scripts is making git more opaque.

Personally, I would prefer an approach of using an embedded script
interpreter: then language incompatibilities become a non-issue.
git-busybox sounded like a great idea for portability.

Although I have never tested git-box (git-busybox) under Linux, I
believe it would work well because all Unix specific code remains the
same as in busybox. Making git-box part of git would increase git
binary size by ~200kb IIRC.
-- 
Duy