# Shortcomings

This file is for tracking features that are less well implemented or less powerful than their Git counterparts for one reason or another.

### gix-index

* The `link` extension can be read, but won't be written. This effectively disables the use of a split index once a mutating operation is run on it with `gitoxide`.

### gix-protocol

* **Fetches using protocol V1 and stateful connections, i.e. ssh, git, file, may hang**
    * This can be fixed by making response parsing.
    * Note that this does not affect cloning, which works fine.

### gix-pack

* **Packfiles use memory maps**
    * Even though they are comfortable to use and fast, they squelch IO errors.
    * _Potential remedy_: We could generalize the `Pack` to make it possible to work on in-memory buffers directly. That way, one
      would initialize a `Pack` by reading the whole file into memory, thus not squelching IO errors at the expense of latency as well
      as memory efficiency.
* **Packfiles cannot load files bigger than 2^31 or 2^32 on 32-bit systems**
    * As these systems cannot address more memory than that.
    * _Potential remedy_: implement a sliding window to map and unmap portions of the file as needed.
        * However, those who need to access big packs on these systems would rather resort to Git itself, allowing
          our implementation to be simpler and potentially more performant.
* **Objects larger than 32 bits cannot be loaded on 32-bit systems**
    * In-memory representations objects cannot handle objects greater than the amount of addressable memory.
    * This will not affect Git LFS though.

### gix

* Object replacements are read once upon opening the repository from their refs and changes to these won't be picked up.

### gix-url

* **gix-url** _might_ be more restrictive than what Git allows as for the most part, it uses a browser grade URL parser.
    * Thus far there is no proof for this, and as _potential remedy_ we could certainly re-implement exactly what Git does
      to handle its URLs.