On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 7:54 AM Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Patrick Steinhardt [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

The question I have here is what the benefit would be to have separate
libraries.

Mostly flexibility.  If we do not value it, then that is OK, though.

And personally I would have to say that "meson rolled everything
into a single library archive" is a bad excuse---whatever came later
doing things differently from the incumbent has to have a good reason
to do things differently, or it is a regression.

I don't understand why "Simplify Cargo's job of linking with the build
systems of Makefile and Meson" Isn't a good enough reason by itself.
Nor do I understand why having libxdiff.a and libreftable.a produces a
better developer experience. My developer experience has been strictly
worse because of this separation. If we keep Makefile the way that it
was and change Meson to also produce separate static libraries then
we'll need to keep 3 build systems in sync with each other. If we roll
everything into libgit.a then Cargo only ever needs to know about that
static library, Meson doesn't change, and there's no question about
where new object files should be added in Makefile. If we do add a 3rd
conceptual stand alone library then we'd only need to add the source
files to Makefile and Meson, but if we insist on separate static
libraries then we'll have to add the source files (as usual) and make
sure that Makefile, Meson, and Cargo are all in agreement about the
static libraries being produced.