—“El que algo quiere algo le cuesta”

This past week and a half has been exhausting; I still don’t have the Goal1 series merged into next.

This weekend, I had both my graph and Goal1 series pushed to the mailing list, and since the list is less active on weekends, I had some spare time.

I had been meaning to review Tian’s series from a while ago, but I hadn’t found the time to do it properly. This weekend was finally the time.

I wanted to do a thorough review, but until now, I had never reviewed further than just reading the code, maybe pulling it locally, and testing on the tip of the series. This time, I wanted to review it commit by commit.

My first (and not very clever) thought was to run git rebase -i $base and mark everything as edit. But that sounded very impractical, and having to type edit manually… No, it couldn’t be that.

What I ended up doing was running git switch --detach <commit>. This way, I could break and mess around with Tian’s commits as much as I wanted to get to the bottom of everything.

The experience… was tricky. I think it’s a very intricate topic where you must be very careful about what you’re doing. I originally meant to spend just one evening on it, but I ended up needing the next morning as well.

I really enjoyed that, now that I feel much more comfortable with the Git codebase, I can actually do deep reviews. It’s something I like because I get to see how others code, and I always end up learning new stuff.

After the weekend, some more nits landed on the graph series, but other than that, the series seems to be done. I hope to see a “Will merge to next” at next What’s cooking on Git.

You can check out the graph series here:

graph series

We went from one commit to seven, but I’m very proud of how the final result turned out.

The rest of the week was dedicated mainly to two series:

  1. I “finished” the git backfill --dry-run option series (it’s on GitHub). There might still be some edge cases, and some of the code is rough, but it is RFC material—which is exactly what I wanted. The happy path works, along with some edge cases that I caught while testing. github series

  2. The rest of my effort and the main focus this week, has been fast-tracking Goal1 to try and finish it once and for all.

    I’m a bit worried about time; there’s only one month left, and this series is blocking Goal2, which has been sitting on my GitHub for many weeks. I’m a bit frustrated about that, though I can’t say it’s unfair because the feedback I’m getting is spot-on regarding things I actually need to fix.

    Anyway, it does what it’s supposed to do. The remaining things to cover are just nits, making the protocol less ambiguous and not overly trusting.

    In the last version, Junio suggested there should be a cheap way of requesting a bare OID so we could have an existence test, if you want to know if there’s an object on the remote, you could just send a bare OID.

    However, the server side wasn’t ready for this. it was designed to always work with at least one requested attribute (“size” in this case). Because of that, I had to add a new patch to get the server side behaving how we want. Now the series is a mix of server- and client-side changes, sadly.

    As of today, I spent the whole day (and by whole day, I mean the whole day, haha) reviewing and cleaning up the Goal1 series so the next reroll can (hopefully!) be the last. I’m almost done, but I still have to finish the last two commits of the series. That will definitely be a task for tomorrow because today I’m so f* tired. After that, I’m really confident it will be ready or como muchísimo (exagerated “at most”), just some tiny nits.

This morning while I was coding, I’ve been in a voice channel on the Git Discord server talking with whoever wanted to join. Tian and Siddharth joined :).

To sum up, this week has been tough, I’ve been coding non-stop, but I think it will all be worth it.

See you next Thursday, Pablo