Re: egit/jgit wishlist

måndag 04 december 2006 19:16 skrev Grzegorz Kulewski:

Hi,

I am interested in seeing GIT support in Eclipse.

I think that doing it in 100% pure Java is ok in long run but I wonder if
you couldn't make "wrapper" plugin for a start (that would call the real C
git for every operation) and make it usable (with full pure Java SWT UI
support) and then try to implement feature by feature in pure Java (with
config options telling what should be called by wrapper and what by pure
implementation)?

This way we could probably rather fast (basic versions of other GIT UIs
were created rather fast IIRC) have basic support for GIT (preferably
with GIT Java wrapper library for other projects) that would be usable for
most users and this way you could gain more interest in the project. Also
testing new pure implementation would be a lot easier (changing one line
in config file to enable some pure Java feature and of course having an
option to come back to wrapped version of this feature if new pure
implementation was wrong).

What do you think about it?

Calling wrappers on top of C (JNI/exec), bash script, perl script etc etc is 
not very easy or quick and requiring all dependencies on whatnot, makes 
installation of plugins very complicated. There would go a lot of work into 
working with the wrappers, instead of creating a pure Java implementation. As 
Shawn knows the Git internals very well, and the datastructures being 
documented, implementing a pure java version is the best thing, and maybe the 
simplest, to do If an complete C library existed, maybe things would be 
different. Most of the git storage access is already there.

Note that many Git tools work with egit too allowing a smooth transition and 
the implementation of feature by feature. I use clone, pull, push, Stacked 
git, and the CVS tools today just fine in the same working area as egit. 
Having a dependency on bash/perl/python etc, etc i EGIT would be counter 
productive. I /could/ imaging a C-implementation of the index to make it 
fully interoperable with the git tools in the same working area, but that's 
about it, because that would have to be C as java's portable API's does not 
include lstat.

It is possible though for those that wish to implement a separate plugin that 
provides wrapper-implementation of certain features. To eclipse that would 
just be yet another plugin that provides some git-related feature.  Such 
plugins could use egit, jgit if necessary.