Re: [PATCH RFC v2 2/2] Move libgit.a sources into separate "lib/" directory

["SZEDER Gábor" <szeder.dev@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 12:38:22PM +0200, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> The Git project is not exactly the easiest project to get started in:
> it's written in C and POSIX shell, with bits of Perl, Rust and other
> languages sprinkled into it. On top of that, the project has grown
> somewhat organically over time, making the codebase hard to navigate.
> 
> These are problems that we're aware of, and there have been and still
> are efforts to clean up some of the technical debt that is natural to
> exist an a project that is more than 20 years old. Furthermore, we
> provide resources to newcomers that help them out like our coding
> guidelines, code of conduct or "MyFirstContribution.adoc".
> 
> But there is a rather practical problem: finding your way around in our
> project's tree is not easy. Doing a directory listing in the top-level
> directory will present you with more than 550 files, which makes it
> extremely hard for a newcomer to figure out what files they are even
> supposed to look at. This makes the onboarding experience somewhat
> harder than it really needs to be. This isn't only a problem for
> newcomers though, as I myself struggle to find the files I am looking
> for because of the sheer number of files.
> 
> Besides the problem of discoverability it also creates a problem of
> structure. It is not obvious at all which files are part of "libgit.a"
> and which files are only linked into our final executables. So while we
> have this split in our build systems, that split is not evident at all
> in our tree.
> 
> Introduce a new "lib/" directory and move all of our sources for
> "libgit.a" into it to fix these issues. It makes the split we have
> evident and reduces the number of files in our top-level tree from 550
> files to ~80 files.
> 
> This is still a lot of files, but it's significantly easier to navigate
> already. Furthermore, we can further iterate after this step and think
> about introducing a better structure for remaining files, as well.

Please also discuss the drawbacks of this proposal, and try to argue
convincingly that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

I, for one, see myself being rather annoyed by regular 'git log
lib/foo.c' stopping at the rename barrier, and by the limitations of
'--follow'.

In my opinion this patch just trades one annoyance to an other, and,
therefore, it's not worth the churn.