Re: My summary of the Git Contributors' Summit 2026, was Re: Git v3.0 timeline, was Re: What's cooking in git.git (Sep 2026, #08)

Hi Daniele,

On Wed, 23 Sep 2026, Daniele Sassoli wrote:

Thanks so much for this summary, I didn't participate at the contributor
summit as I was leading one of the breakout sessions in the morning and
had a plane to catch in the afternoon, so I'm very grateful of your
summary.

I'm glad it was helpful!

On 22/09/2026 19:44, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

[... snip ...]

quoted

Pluggable object database

Patrick's pluggable object database is working, but it is not
complete: commit-graph and multi-pack-index integration are still
outstanding, and a repository extension is planned. (Personal note: It
might be interesting to see whether implementing a storage backend is
easier in core Git or in another Git-compatible implementation. JGit
should be a natural target, having originated within BigTable-sized
constraints, i.e. a different storage system, but funding seems to
have dried up, there's not even SHA-256 support, so JGit might not be
as hackable as it once was.)

Pluggable backend implementations for JGit have been possible for quite
some time, although, admittedly, I don't think any made it to
production. Maybe at the time when this was introduced(16 years ago!!)
by Shawn[1] in JGit it wasn't fashionable yet and so the project was
never carried forward. I know Luca submitted a talk for the Gerrit User
Summit to present a Cassandra back-end, for which I can see conversation
started 10 years ago[2].

Regarding JGit support's for SHA256, I know some corporations have had
interest in sponsoring this work and have discussed potentially
implementing together it with GerritForge, but, as far as I know, work
isn't ongoing yet. JGit is still very much developed and kept up to date
with great effort from the community, so I believe it to still be as
hackable as it was, there just hasn't been enough interest for SHA-256
yet, which I agree is a shame, hopefully in the near future this gets
remediated.

[1] https://github.com/spearce/jgit_cassandra
[2] https://groups.google.com/g/repo-discuss/c/IekVPmow0yE

I'm glad to hear that JGit isn't stalled, even though I doubt that the
SHA-256 support could be done without any corporate support.

Ciao,
Johannes