Re: egit/jgit wishlist

[Steven Grimm <koreth@midwinter.com>]

Shawn Pearce wrote:
> I personally want to avoid calling external programs
> as much as possible here, and that means staying with a 100% pure
> Java implementation.  

I think that's exactly the right decision.

One big advantage of doing it this way is that it will be reasonably 
cross-platform from the start. As soon as you start running external 
programs, you introduce all the system dependencies of the Git 
command-line tools, especially acute if you're running some of the non-C 
porcelain commands (which will then require a working shell or Perl 
environment to be installed.)

With a wrapper-based implementation, the temptation would probably be 
pretty great to just leave some stuff implemented as wrappers and not 
bother porting them, which would potentially kill portability. Insisting 
on 100% pure Java means that particular temptation is never an issue.