Welcome to the 87th edition of Git Rev News, a digest of all things Git. For our goals, the archives, the way we work, and how to contribute or to subscribe, see the Git Rev News page on git.github.io.
This edition covers what happened during the months of April and May 2022.
Git participates in GSoC (Google Summer of Code) 2022
The following three contributors have been officially accepted to work on Git as part of the GSoC 2022:
Abhradeep Chakraborty will work on the Reachability bitmap improvements project. He will be co-mentored by Kaartic Sivaraam and Taylor Blau.
Shaoxuan Yuan will work on the More Sparse Index Integrations project. He will be co-mentored by Derrick Stolee and Victoria Dye.
Jaydeep Das will work on the Unify ref-filters with other pretty formats project. He will be co-mentored by Hariom Verma and Christian Couder. His first blog post about it is up.
Congratulations to the selected contributors!
Thanks also to the other contributors who applied and worked on micro-projects, but couldn’t be selected! We hope to continue to see you in the community!
[ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update
Taylor Blau announced that the Heroku credits for git-scm.com, Git project’s de facto homepage, would not be provided for free by Heroku anymore.
The Git project has so far relied on those free credits from Heroku and free support from Cloudflare to have $0 maintenance cost for the site.
Taylor suggested different options to deal with the change:
convert to a static site, so that we don’t rely on Heroku and can be hosted elsewhere hopefully for free,
try to reduce our Heroku bill by getting rid of some of the services we currently use (like database and Ruby on Rails cache),
find a cheaper Ruby on Rails host.
The Heroku credits amount to around $132 per month that are now billed to Git’s account at Conservancy, as Git is Conservancy member, while we “figure out what to do next”.
A few days later, Taylor replied to himself saying that Dan Moore from FusionAuth has offered to help assist with our hosting costs, as FusionAuth, his company, “has benefited tremendously from Git”.
Git project funds are usually used for things like sponsoring travel and lodging for Git Merge attendees who could not otherwise make it in person, so helping for hosting costs is welcome.
Sponsors for the site are listed on the Sponsors section of the about page, so we would just have to list FusionAuth there along with Cloudflare and Bonsai.
Dan then replied to Taylor confirming that FusionAuth “would love to offer [their] monetary support if it makes sense for the community”.
Both Kaartic Sivaraam and Phillip Wood thanked Dan and his company for their offer, and agreed with Taylor that it would be a good solution.
Johannes Schindelin, alias Dscho, also replied to Taylor saying he would be in favor of converting the site to a static web site. Taylor then replied to Dscho, explaining some tasks, along with technical details, that would need to be taken care of for the conversion.
Junio Hamano, Taylor and Christian Couder also discussed the idea of proposing such conversion tasks as a future Outreachy or GSoC project.
For now the Git project accepted FusionAuth’s generous offer, and the git-scm.com web site will continue to run in the same way.
Who are you and what do you do?
I am a Peruvian hacker who likes to argue he is also “American” to his neighbours and accidental coworkers/friends in the USA, because while I flew to get here, and I even crossed an ocean to do so, I might as well have walked instead.
To be honest, my close family and probably most of my friends in Perú would instead call me a “characato” but I am starting to worry I am getting slightly off-topic here.
About “what I do”, it is a little complicated; I used to call myself a “server babysitter” until I had a real human one and realized how inaccurate that was. I usually have a lot of computers around me and one day realized I might become a cyborg of sorts even if none of them is strictly connected to me, because AFAIK nobody has figured out how to do that yet, but again I seem to be going off-topic, because I am guessing what you really meant is either “what it says in my current business card” or “what sort of thing I do to contribute to society that is good enough so I have the means to pay the bills”?
Well; due to either a series of unfortunate misunderstandings or some bureaucratic mistake akin to the Vogon Constructor Fleet job that demolished Earth at the beginning of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I am now open to a lot more opportunities to help you do anything, and MUST do it for free. Hope that is a good answer, but ping me if you would like some additional explanation.
What would you name your most important contribution to Git?
None.
I did break Git for macOS once long ago when I was trying to make it more useful in Linux. Then, I did the same at least once for Windows after I bought an Apple computer to make sure that wouldn’t happen again and changed my email address so no one would be able to connect the dots.
I might have found one bug in Windows that might have redeemed me from that breakage after I bought a Windows computer for similar reasons though.
I did fix Git for Minix after I met Linus Torvalds in a Google conference and just in spite of him not understanding a funny joke I made (not a fault of his, I am sure, since I have such a thick accent I sometimes can’t understand myself), but I had yet to upstream the patches, so maybe that?
Either way, I am hoping whatever it is, it will be great and might make my mom or my son proud, even if it is yet to come.
What are you doing on the Git project these days, and why?
Scratching itches and learning from the best, aren’t you?
If you could get a team of expert developers to work full time on something in Git for a full year, what would it be?
I’m not sure if it will take a full year, but it would be great to have a Git conference to get everyone in a room (obviously not while there is a pandemic, of course).
Something less ambitious but maybe even more effective would be to get a virtual hackathon, even though I have to admit realistically a physical one would be even better.
It is a shame they don’t do the “Linux cruise” anymore, but it might be also a good format at a much smaller scale and I even remember reading somewhere that even in a cruise (which usually has terrible internet connectivity), Git was still useful since you might as well send patches around in USB drives.
I guess the first thing to implement in that hackathon might be ZMODEM transport for git push/pull, and I might be more than happy to make sure everyone has a working cable to use if they are still lucky enough to get a computer that has a DB9.
If you could remove something from Git without worrying about backwards compatibility, what would it be?
The bugs, but then even those are fun to have from time to time.
What is your favorite Git-related tool/library, outside of Git itself?
I don’t have a favorite, but it is because I just don’t know enough to have one. Luckily you guys have this monthly “magazine” of sorts, so I might be able to eventually find one.
It sort of feels as exciting as when I used to go to one private library in my hometown to read about the latest games in the computer magazines they had that I might be able to type into that first computer my parents got for me, that had an 8-bit CPU and 64KB of RAM (not all of it totally usable though, as it also had a ROM with a basic interpreter that I think used half of that), but I am not sure.
Do you happen to have any memorable experience w.r.t. contributing to the Git project? If yes, could you share it with us?
Lots indeed, that is why I sometimes actively try to fix some bugs any reasonable person would either ignore or at most report.
My code might be a mess, but I think it is usually better than a bug, and I get the chance to get to work and learn from people that are way better than me at fixing them, mostly nicer as well, and especially way more patient than I would be.
How does your mailing list workflow look like?
What do you mean by workflow?
(Editor’s note: Here, Carlo jokes about his workflow which according to him “is a nightmare that is stitched together with masking tape”.)
What is your advice for people who want to start Git development? Where and how should they start?
My first contribution was probably a real and annoying bug that I couldn’t believe was there, so most people I presume would just scratch that itch and go away.
Some might fall in love with the technology, or the community and come back like I did.
Regardless of that, there is a lot of wisdom (and luckily for me, incomplete features or minor bugs) which once you realize this tool is meant to be used by developers, kind of makes sense.
The documentation and the list content is pure gold, so take your time to read as much of it as you can first, if possible.
Jump straight at it and make sure all the tests and linters are quiet and try to fight the urge to send it out until you can’t improve it further and let it go.
Read the feedback you’d get, and try to improve it further based on that, and iterate. Be patient and take your time.
If there’s one tip you would like to share with other Git developers, what would it be?
Don’t Panic.
Light reading
git rebase in which you rename a file without conflicts – though
nowadays one would use git filter-repo
instead of git filter-branch as in the article.
Post on Andraž Bajt’s blog.Git tools and sites
This edition of Git Rev News was curated by Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>, Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>, Markus Jansen <mja@jansen-preisler.de> and Kaartic Sivaraam <kaartic.sivaraam@gmail.com> with help from Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belón, Bruno Brito and Luca Milanesio.