NGit

One of the features we want to include in the next MonoDevelop release is integrated support of Git. I committed a first version of a git add-in some months ago which works by invoking the git command and parsing the results. This solution satisfied some basic needs (Mono was moving to git at that time), but it was done as a short term solution, since parsing git output is not very reliable, and has portability issues.

The next obvious step was to use GitSharp, a fully managed .NET library which implements most of git commands. This library is basically a port of JGit, a Java library for doing the same. I started replacing the git invocations by calls to GitSharp classes, and I could implement the basic functionality, but I found some limitations that were not easy to overcome. On one hand, GitSharp was a bit outdated, lacking some of the recent features and bug fixes done in JGit. Bringing GitSharp up to date with JGit would be a lot of work, since every JGit commit had to be manually translated from Java to C#. On the other hand, GitSharp depends on a set of cryptographic libraries (required for the ssh protocol support) which we can't easily include in MonoDevelop due to export regulations.

I then decided to try a different approach: the idea was to use Sharpen, a free Java to C# translator implemented by db4o, to automatically convert the JGit code to C#.

After some weeks of work, I have been able to generate a C# library (which I call NGit) with all the JGit code. Most of the work went into tunning and fixing Sharpen, and into implementing in C# some core Java classes which didn't have direct replacement in Mono. This was more complex and took more time than I expected, but I think the effort is worth it. The generation of the library is automatic, although not perfect since it requires some patches in the java code and some patches in the generated code, but the patches are small and easy to maintain. Keeping NGit in sync with JGit is very easy, since it is just a matter of pulling the java code and running the conversion (I already have the conversion process automated in a makefile).

I've also been able to convert and run the JGit unit tests, and got 90% of tests working. The failures of the remaining 10% are in general due to different behavior of Java vs C#, or JUnit vs NUnit, and are not real NGit bugs (although I still have to review some of them).

In the process, I also converted Jsch, which is the library used by JGit for the ssh communication. The new NSch library only has Mono.Security as external dependency, so it will be much easier to distribute for us.

So, we now have a fully managed git library with ssh support without any dependency external to Mono. The library has around 56000 lines of generated C# code (including the unit tests). I recently published the source code in github.

I'm now implementing the git add-in using NGit. Most of the commands are already implemented, although I'll have to do some testing before I push it to master. There are still some performance issues I'm tracking down, but things are looking good. I intend to submit my fixes to JGit. My fist patch has already been accepted and pushed, and conveniently ported to NGit.

Update: I'd like to clarify the relation of NGit with GitSharp. GitSharp is composed by two libraries: GitSharp.Core.dll and GitSharp.dll. GitSharp.Core.dll is a manual port of JGit. GitSharp.dll is a more high level and .NET friendly API that wraps GitSharp.Core.dll. NGit can be a replacement for GitSharp.Core.dll, but GitSharp.dll is still useful, since NGit may be a bit too low level and java-ish for some use cases.