Re: Finer timestamps and serialization in git

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 20, 2019, 12:40 UTC
Message-ID: <20190520124039.GF11212@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <86r28tpikt.fsf@gmail.com>

On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 11:43:14AM +0200, Jakub Narebski wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> You can receive new commits in the repository by creating them, and from
> other repository (via push or fetch).  In the second case you often get
> many commits at once.
> 
> In [1] it is described how using "bitmap index" you can avoid parsing
> commits when deciding which objects to send to the client; they can be
> directly copied to the client (added to the packfile that is sent to
> client).  Thanks to this reachability bitmap (bit vector) the time to
> clone Linux repository decreased from 57 seconds to 1.6 seconds.

No, this is mixing up sending and receiving. On the sending side, we try very hard not to open up objects if we can avoid it (using tricks like reachability bitmaps helps us quickly decide what to send, and reusing the on-disk packfile data lets us send out objects without decompressing them).

But on the receiving side, we do not trust the sender at all. The protocol specifically does not send the sha1 of any object. The receiver instead inflates every object it gets and computes the object hash itself. And then on top of that, we traverse the commit graph to make sure that the server sent us all of the objects we need to have a complete graph.

So adding any extra object-quality checks on the receiving side would not really change that equation.

But I do otherwise agree with your mail that the general idea of having the receiver _change_ the incoming objects is going to lead to a world of headaches.

-Peff