Currently, GitPython is used to get git metadata from package repository. It has some limitation, like handle Python str or bytes returned from older and newer GitPython, and it does not support git worktree.

pygit2 is another choice but it does not support to work with Python 2.6.

Git operations required by rpkg are just read commit hash, config, and list commits. All these can be done by subprocess of git.

Note that, universal_newlines=True must be passed to subprocess in order to get text from command output.