On Sat, Jun 27, 2026 at 08:40:48AM +0200, SZEDER Gábor wrote:

On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 12:38:22PM +0200, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

quoted

The Git project is not exactly the easiest project to get started in:
it's written in C and POSIX shell, with bits of Perl, Rust and other
languages sprinkled into it. On top of that, the project has grown
somewhat organically over time, making the codebase hard to navigate.

These are problems that we're aware of, and there have been and still
are efforts to clean up some of the technical debt that is natural to
exist an a project that is more than 20 years old. Furthermore, we
provide resources to newcomers that help them out like our coding
guidelines, code of conduct or "MyFirstContribution.adoc".

But there is a rather practical problem: finding your way around in our
project's tree is not easy. Doing a directory listing in the top-level
directory will present you with more than 550 files, which makes it
extremely hard for a newcomer to figure out what files they are even
supposed to look at. This makes the onboarding experience somewhat
harder than it really needs to be. This isn't only a problem for
newcomers though, as I myself struggle to find the files I am looking
for because of the sheer number of files.

Besides the problem of discoverability it also creates a problem of
structure. It is not obvious at all which files are part of "libgit.a"
and which files are only linked into our final executables. So while we
have this split in our build systems, that split is not evident at all
in our tree.

Introduce a new "lib/" directory and move all of our sources for
"libgit.a" into it to fix these issues. It makes the split we have
evident and reduces the number of files in our top-level tree from 550
files to ~80 files.

This is still a lot of files, but it's significantly easier to navigate
already. Furthermore, we can further iterate after this step and think
about introducing a better structure for remaining files, as well.

Please also discuss the drawbacks of this proposal, and try to argue
convincingly that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

This is overall a subjective change, so there is no "right" or "wrong".
The reason why I think the pain is ultimately worth it is that it's a
one-time cost for a permanent improvement in discoverability. And that
improvement is especially helpful for newcomers, who already have a hard
time navigating the code base.

I, for one, see myself being rather annoyed by regular 'git log
lib/foo.c' stopping at the rename barrier, and by the limitations of
'--follow'.

Right. As mentioned in a parallel subthread, I think this is a
deficiency in Git itself which we are in the best position to fix. If it
is proving to be painful, then it might even help to subject ourselves
to the same pain that other projects that do larger renames experience.
So it might motivate us to improve this area.

In any case, I'll amend these thoughts to the commit message, thanks!

Patrick