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I got a bit frustrated that libgit2 didn't offer an API
or "git archive" commands. I started implementing generating tarballs
from scratch in src/tar.c and I'm quite liking it: the specification is
very small, and the code can be very simple, since all I'm doing is
writing fresh tarballs, and not reading or updating them.
However I felt a bit locked-in to libgit2 itself, and what a detour from
my original goal that is, and the question "what should libgit2 provide"
came up to my mind. This made me realize that libgit2 is playing
catch-up with Git itself, for as long as Git doesn't explicit has an
explicit API, a standard, a public version of its internal libgit.a, or
something like that. In fact, I'm locked in to Git, even.
So even though a C version would probably be much faster, it wouldn't
really have less dependencies, and that's what I'm actually optimising
for: having the software be as portable as possible. On that front, C
is unbeatable with sh as a close second. But the extreme portability
of C aren't being fully exploited here: libgit2 does depend on non-POSIX
things like CMake (and quick grep even shows
references to -D_GNU_SOURCE!!), and Git's Makefile itself isn't POSIX
at all. The point is: by depending on either Git or libgit2, I'm
already loosing many selling points of writing the software in C, and
sh becomes much more attractive. Had existed a common DVCS interface
that could make me decouple gistatic from Git somehow I would insist a
bit more in C, but now I'm switching to sh.
The fact that I was able to get further with sh in one sitting than I
did with C shows that a) I'm a bit less fluent in C than I would like
(at least for now ^^) and b) that it is actually much simpler to do.
I am quite satisfied with the quality of C code that I got so far. The
error handling and propagation is pretty robust, and the implementation
is very disciplined. I did most of the development with Valgrind, and
other sanitizers would help even further, with some fuzzers on top.
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