= Improving performance for Trac's git support

== Using python bindings for git rather than the git command-line

This could be an alternative backend that would avoid the cost of spawning git executables and parsing their standard output.

The trade-offs could be the following, bindings vs. command-line:
 - (+) faster (but how much?)
 - (?) robustness
   - (+) no pipe handling and dangling processes (is this still problematic?)
   - (-) crashes?
 - (-) memory usage (risk of memory leaks?)

Peter Stuge started a conversion of the backend, see his early work in his [http://git.stuge.se/?p=trac.git;a=summary;js=1 pygit2wip] branch.


=== Installation

First you'll need to install the git bindings for Python:
 - [https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 libgit2]
 - [https://github.com/libgit2/pygit2 pygit2]
And for building `libgit2`, you'll need [http://cmake.org cmake].

==== Windows build instructions, for Python 2.6 or 2.7 with VC9 #pygit2-msvc9

Follow the instructions given in this section: https://github.com/libgit2/pygit2#building-on-windows

At this point you're ready to build the bindings themselves:
{{{
$ git clone https://github.com/libgit2/pygit2
$ cd pygit2
$ ls $LIBGIT2
bin include lib
$ python setup.py install
}}}