Re: linking libgit.a in C++ projects

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 1:44 AM, cte [off-list ref] wrote:

Using output from the command line utilities as an API has its own set
of problems. For instance, check out some of the difficulties that
gitk and qgit have had to deal with:
http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2007/11/2/379067.

There is no problem with parsing. If you want to receive the output
in the specific order, Git has to read everything first, and that
is *slow*. So, --topo-order is convenient but slow, and it is slow
not because it is piping data, but because it takes some time to
read the whole history.

Digging into
the git internals and reusing its core functions will always be more
powerful and flexible than parsing command line output.

"Flexible" is not a synonym of the word "useful". For instance, using
core functions will not help you to overcome the aforementioned problem.
Drawing a graph is NOT what git core functions about. You have to do
that in your GUI, and to do that when revisions are given to you in
arbitrary order is not easy. Yet, it is something what good GUI should
be capable to handle, because otherwise the response time will be bad.


Dmitry