Subject: Re: [GSoC] Proposal Discussion: git-refs Project

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2025 13:02:36 +0100

Hi Yuting,

On Sun, Mar 23, 2025 at 09:36:51PM +0800, Yuting Zheng wrote:
> Dear Git Community,
> 
> I am very interested in applying for the GSoC 2025 project "Consolidate
> ref-related functionality into git-refs". I have reviewed the relevant
> code, documentation, and mailing lists, and as part of the application
> prerequisites, I have submitted a microproject patch
> (https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/).
> 
> My current idea is to extend the `git-refs` command—by calling into the
> existing code—to add subcommands. This approach would replace the
> functionalities of the mentioned commands while ensuring that I do not
> modify the code underlying them. This guarantees that the new `git-refs`
> subcommand meets the new requirements without affecting the usage of the
> existing commands.
> 
> However, when searching the mailing lists with keywords
> “nq:consolidate ref” and “s: refs”, I did not find any discussion about
> merging these commands. If anyone has come across any previous discussions
> or could kindly provide additional insights on this matter, I would greatly
> appreciate your help.
> 
> Thank you for your guidance.

I have been chatting with Peff about this topic quite a while ago, but
that was mostly an in-person chat that hasn't made it onto the mailing
list. I may also have mentioned on the mailing list on several occasions
that it would make sense to consolidate, but there wasn't ever a bigger
discussion around all of this. There's also [1] as a non-authoritative
source for this project that documents my intent to consolidate the
commands.

So ultimately there hasn't been a lot of discussion yet around this
whole thing. Driving consensus and designing the new interface would
thus be one of the biggest challenges in this project from my point of
view.

I'm happy to provide more feedback once an initial draft has been
created for how the project could look like!

Thanks.

Patrick

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/git/-/issues/330