Re: My summary of the Git Contributors' Summit 2026, was Re: Git v3.0 timeline, was Re: What's cooking in git.git (Sep 2026, #08)

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Daniele,

On Wed, 23 Sep 2026, Daniele Sassoli wrote:

> Thanks so much for this summary, I didn't participate at the contributor
> summit as I was leading one of the breakout sessions in the morning and
> had a plane to catch in the afternoon, so I'm very grateful of your
> summary.

I'm glad it was helpful!

> On 22/09/2026 19:44, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>
> [... snip ...]
> > Pluggable object database
> >
> > Patrick's pluggable object database is working, but it is not
> > complete: commit-graph and multi-pack-index integration are still
> > outstanding, and a repository extension is planned. (Personal note: It
> > might be interesting to see whether implementing a storage backend is
> > easier in core Git or in another Git-compatible implementation. JGit
> > should be a natural target, having originated within BigTable-sized
> > constraints, i.e. a different storage system, but funding seems to
> > have dried up, there's not even SHA-256 support, so JGit might not be
> > as hackable as it once was.)
>
> Pluggable backend implementations for JGit have been possible for quite
> some time, although, admittedly, I don't think any made it to
> production. Maybe at the time when this was introduced(16 years ago!!)
> by Shawn[1] in JGit it wasn't fashionable yet and so the project was
> never carried forward. I know Luca submitted a talk for the Gerrit User
> Summit to present a Cassandra back-end, for which I can see conversation
> started 10 years ago[2].
> 
> Regarding JGit support's for SHA256, I know some corporations have had
> interest in sponsoring this work and have discussed potentially
> implementing together it with GerritForge, but, as far as I know, work
> isn't ongoing yet. JGit is still very much developed and kept up to date
> with great effort from the community, so I believe it to still be as
> hackable as it was, there just hasn't been enough interest for SHA-256
> yet, which I agree is a shame, hopefully in the near future this gets
> remediated.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/spearce/jgit_cassandra
> [2] https://groups.google.com/g/repo-discuss/c/IekVPmow0yE

I'm glad to hear that JGit isn't stalled, even though I doubt that the
SHA-256 support could be done without any corporate support.

Ciao,
Johannes