Re: [musl] Re: Regression: git no longer works with musl libc's regex impl

On Wed, Oct 05, 2016 at 12:11:58PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

On Wed, Oct 05, 2016 at 10:59:34PM +1100, James B wrote:

quoted

Number downloads does not make first-tier platform. You know that as
well as everyone else.

First-tier support is the decision made by the maintainers that the
entire features of the software must be available on those first tier
platforms. So if Windows is indeed first-tier platform for git, it
means any features that don't work on git version of Windows must not
be used/developed or even castrated. That's a scary thought.

Prepare to be scared, then, I guess. Ever since the msysgit project
started years ago, we have made concessions in the code to work both
with POSIX-ish systems and with the msys layer. E.g., see how git-daemon
does not fork(), but actually re-spawns itself to handle connections.

When possible we try to put our abstractions at a level where they can
be implemented in a performant way on all platforms (the git-daemon
things is probably the _most_ ugly in that respect; I think nobody has
really cared about the performance enough to add back in a forking code
path for POSIX systems).

quoted

So this decision that "Windows is now a first-tier platform for git" -
is your own opinion, or is this the collective opinion of *all* the
git maintainers?

There is only one maintainer of git: Junio. However, you'll note that I
also used "we" in the paragraphs above. And that is because the approach
I am talking about is something that has been done over the course of
many years by many members of the development community.

You may disagree with that approach, but it is nothing new. The msysgit
project started in 2007.

The goal of the midipix project is to make the need for FOSS projects
supporting Windows to do hacks like this obsolete. It still has a
little ways to go to be ready for mainstream use, but it's already
running a lot, and I hope you'll consider it for the future since it
simplifies things A LOT when you can just write to POSIX instead of
having to come up with abstraction layers that cater to Windows'
brokenness.

quoted

Well thank you for being honest. I can see now why you responded the
way you did (and still do). By being employed by Microsoft, and
especially paid to work on Git for Windows, you have all the
incentives to make it work best on Windows, and to make it as its
first-tier platform within the limitation of Windows.

Please don't insinuate that Johannes is a Microsoft shill. He has been
working on the Windows port of Git for over 9 years, and was only
employed by Microsoft this year. Furthermore, his original REG_STARTEND
patch actually did a run-time fallback of NUL-terminating the input
buffers. It was _I_ who suggested that we should simply push people
towards our compat/regex routines instead. So if you want to be mad at
somebody, be mad at me.

I hope we can get this thread away from accusing and attacking people
and on to doing productive things to make the software better.

Rich