Investigate using isomorphic git

The nodegit dependency has been quite problematic during the life of the cardstack project. Primarily due to all the C++ bindings across the different architectures that we strive to support, and now most recently it looks like nodegit is not compatible with the more secure OpenSSH keys that are created by by default from ssh-keygen https://github.com/nodegit/nodegit/issues/1606.

Isomorphic git https://isomorphic-git.org/ is a pure javascript implementation of git that could alleviate all of these challenges that we’ve been struggling with using nodegit. Let’s investigate migrating to using isomorphic git.

[wmhilton]

As of v0.65.0 isomorphic-git can do full-fledged non-fast-forward merges! I’m not shouting about it from the rooftops yet, but by this weekend I’ll have updated the documentation and be thinking about writing a blog post about this new feature.

@jenweber If it would help, I can go through the APIs table you made and fill in the isomorphic-git column.

[wmhilton]

a public API for directly manipulating a repo (like a “bare repo” use case). We would use it to write blob and tree objects, create commits (including a merge commit), and create/update a branch.

There’s a lot of that in place now! blobs and trees aren’t too hard create with writeObject (although I could add a writeBlob and writeTree to make it even easier) and commit now lets you override all the fields including parent and tree and combined with noUpdateBranch: true lets you create “branch-free, working-dir-free” commit objects. I need to update the documentation for merge this weekend but it should also have similar features now.