Reusable fastimport parser

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Robert Collins wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 11:30 -0400, Greg Ward wrote:
>   
>> So... I'd like to heal the fork before it gets bad.  IMHO the best
>> option would be factor out the non-Bazaar-specific bits of
>> bzr-fastimport and put them in a common library that both
>> bzr-fastimport and hg-fastimport depend on.  Does that sound
>> agreeable?  Any better ideas?
>>
>> If that sounds good, what about Dulwich?  That's an implementation of
>> of Git's protocols and file formats in pure Python; seems like a good
>> place for a common, reusable fastimport parser to live.  I haven't
>> asked the Dulwich maintainers what they think of this idea, but
>> whatever.  Thought I'd start here.  Feedback?
>>     
>
> Dulwich is being written as part of bzr-git, and Jelmer is on this list
> too, so I'm sure you'll get some feedback from him.
>
> For my part, I don't think fastimport is that tightly linked to git -
> its getting extended and tweaked to make it quite general-purpose. I
> think it would be fine to have it be a generic library, as long as there
> are no performance implications in doing so - when you are processing
> millions of entries extra function calls and the like can start to show
> up surprisingly high in timing measurements.
>   
I certainly wouldn't mind having fastimport live in dulwich, if that
eases maintainance on Greg and Ian. It wouldn't be out of place there
given its heritage.

That said, fastimport is very well usable independently of git so it
also seems sensible to have it as a separate project if that works better.

Cheers,

Jelmer