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The idea of Scalar (https://github.com/microsoft/scalar), and before
that, of VFS for Git, has always been to prove that Git _can_ scale, and
to upstream whatever strategies have been demonstrated to help.
With this patch, we start the journey from that C# project to move what
is left to Git's own `contrib/` directory, reimplementing it in pure C,
with the intention to facilitate integrating the functionality into core
Git all while maintaining backwards-compatibility for existing Scalar
users (which will be much easier when both live in the same worktree).
It has always been the plan to contribute all of the proven strategies
back to core Git.
For example, while the virtual filesystem provided by VFS for Git helped
the team developing the Windows operating system to move onto Git, while
trying to upstream it we realized that it cannot be done: getting the
virtual filesystem to work (which we only managed to implement fully on
Windows, but not on, say, macOS or Linux), and the required server-side
support for the GVFS protocol, made this not quite feasible.
The Scalar project learned from that and tackled the problem with
different tactics: instead of pretending to Git that the working
directory is fully populated, it _specifically_ teaches Git about
partial clone (which is based on VFS for Git's cache server), about
sparse checkout (which VFS for Git tried to do transparently, in the
file system layer), and regularly runs maintenance tasks to keep the
repository in a healthy state.
With partial clone, sparse checkout and `git maintenance` having been
upstreamed, there is little left that `scalar.exe` does which `git.exe`
cannot do. One such thing is that `scalar clone <url>` will
automatically set up a partial, sparse clone, and configure
known-helpful settings from the start.
So let's bring this convenience into Git's tree.
The idea here is that you can (optionally) build Scalar via
make -C contrib/scalar/
This will build the `scalar` executable and put it into the
contrib/scalar/ subdirectory.
The slightly awkward addition of the `contrib/scalar/*` bits to the
top-level `Makefile` are actually really required: we want to link to
`libgit.a`, which means that we will need to use the very same `CFLAGS`
and `LDFLAGS` as the rest of Git.
An early development version of this patch tried to replicate all the
conditional code in `contrib/scalar/Makefile` (e.g. `NO_POLL`) just like
`contrib/svn-fe/Makefile` used to do before it was retired. It turned
out to be quite the whack-a-mole game: the SHA-1-related flags, the
flags enabling/disabling `compat/poll/`, `compat/regex/`,
`compat/win32mmap.c` & friends depending on the current platform... To
put it mildly: it was a major mess.
Instead, this patch makes minimal changes to the top-level `Makefile` so
that the bits in `contrib/scalar/` can be compiled and linked, and
adds a `contrib/scalar/Makefile` that uses the top-level `Makefile` in a
most minimal way to do the actual compiling.
Note: With this commit, we only establish the infrastructure, no
Scalar functionality is implemented yet; We will do that incrementally
over the next few commits.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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Johannes Schindelin