Re: [PATCH] gc: do not warn about too many loose objects

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 16, 2018, 22:03 UTC
Message-ID: <20180716220306.GI11513@aiede.svl.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20180716214539.GL25189@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King wrote:

> I don't think any command should report failure of its _own_ operation
> if "gc --auto" failed. And grepping around the source code shows that we
> typically ignore it.

Oh, good point. In non-daemon mode, we don't let "gc --auto" failure cause the invoking command to fail, but in daemon mode we do. That should be a straightforward fix; patch coming in a moment.

> On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 02:40:03PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

>> For comparison, in non-daemon mode, there is nothing enforcing the
>> kind of ratelimiting you are talking about.  It is an accident of
>> history.  If we want this kind of ratelimiting, I'd rather we build it
>> deliberately instead of relying on this accident.
>
> What I was trying to say earlier is that we _did_ build this
> rate-limiting, and I think it is a bug that the non-daemon case does not
> rate-limit (but nobody noticed, because the default is daemonizing).
>
> So the fix is not "rip out the rate-limiting in daemon mode", but rather
> "extend it to the non-daemon case".

Can you point me to some discussion about building that rate-limiting? The commit message for v2.12.2~17^2 (gc: ignore old gc.log files, 2017-02-10) definitely doesn't describe that as its intent.

This is the kind of review that Dscho often complains about, where someone tries to fix something small but significant to users and gets told to build something larger that was not their itch instead.

The comments about the "Why is 'git commit' so slow?" experience and how having the warning helps with that are well taken. I think we should be able to find a way to keep the warning in a v2 of this patch. But the rest about rate-limiting and putting unreachable objects in packs etc as a blocker for this are demoralizing, since they gives the feeling that even if I handle the cases that are handled today well, it will never be enough for the project unless I solve the larger problems that were already there.

Jonathan