rn-40: add Nico's interview

rev_news/drafts/edition-40.md

@@ -29,9 +29,81 @@ This edition covers what happened during the month of May 2018.
 ### Support
 -->
 
-<!---
-## Developer Spotlight:
--->
+## Developer Spotlight: Nicolas Pitre
+
+* Who are you and what do you do?
+
+I graduated with a software engineering degree from École
+Polytechnique de Montréal. I'm currently a software architect on the
+OCTO team at Linaro. I spent most of my professional life working on
+the Linux kernel for the ARM architecture. And being a code tinkerer
+at heart, I am often looking at assembly output from the compiler to
+see what it made of my code.
+
+* How did you get involved in Git?
+
+When Linus Torvalds announced that he'd be taking a break from kernel
+work to dedicate some time to the creation of a new code management
+system of his own then I got intrigued. I expected this new system to
+have an impact on my kernel work flow so I wanted to test it early on.
+And of course I quickly got annoyed by all the shortcomings Git had in
+those early days, so I started making patches and became a regular
+contributor for a few years.
+
+* What would you name your most important contribution to Git?
+
+Delta compression, and object packing heuristics. Getting git-repack
+to produce smaller packs and do it faster became an obsession of mine
+for a while.
+
+* If you could get a team of expert developers to work full time on
+  something in Git for a full year, what would it be?
+
+The git pack format version 2. This is something I worked on for a
+while, from the format definition to the first proof-of-concept
+implementation. The initial pack size reduction over the current
+format was really interesting (around 20%) and the potential for
+significant runtime speed-ups was there in theory. In practice that
+meant reworking most of git's inner core code to benefit from all the
+direct object references provided by that pack format. The existing
+proof of concept simply implemented backward compatibility with the
+rest of git which made it slower than the current pack format. And
+because the current format is already quite efficient already, this
+project was facing diminishing returns and I could no longer justify
+the required time to work on it. But... if I could get a team for a
+year...
+
+* As a git user, what functionality would you like to see implemented?
+
+I really get annoyed when fetching a tracked repository and all the
+tags from that remote repo are merged with my own tags, or with tags
+from another remote repo. We have a separate namespace for remote
+branches but not for remote tags. That makes it very hard to know
+where a particular tag comes from, and "git remote rm" doesn't get rid
+of them either. This also pollutes the git-describe output.
+
+I think remote tags should have separate namespaces by default just
+like remote branches, with similar disambiguation rules when referring
+to a tag using a partial path. That's something I meant to implement
+myself for years now but never got around to it.
+
+* If you could remove something from Git without worrying about
+  backwards compatibility, what would it be?
+
+Some of the early choices I made in the delta compression encoding
+format. But that format is simply too widely used now to consider
+incompatible changes just for the sake of being marginally more
+efficient.
+
+* What is your favorite Git-related tool/library, outside of Git itself?
+
+I'm pretty much a pure-git user and never got used to any of the
+associated tools. I grew my git usage while I was also a git developer
+with a pretty good knowledge of its internals and native capabilities.
+Most tools on top of git are meant to provide a different user
+experience that always gave me the impression they were in the way of
+the actual basic git command I wanted to use.
+
 
 ## Developer Spotlight: Nicolas Pitre
 
@@ -133,4 +205,4 @@ Christian Couder &lt;<[email protected]>&gt;,
 Jakub Narębski &lt;<[email protected]>&gt;,
 Markus Jansen &lt;<[email protected]>&gt; and
 Gabriel Alcaras &lt;<[email protected]>&gt;
-with help from Adam Spiers.
+with help from Adam Spiers and Nicolas Pitre.