Re: [PATCH 04/21] gc: drop the_repository in log location

From: Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com>
Date: Jul 9, 2020, 02:22 UTC
Message-ID: <20200709022257.36743-1-jonathantanmy@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <e13d351e9ff19695b2ff638af01fdb4527fb7a6d.1594131695.git.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

Show 7 quoted lines

> From: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
> 
> The report_last_gc_error() method use git_pathdup() which implicitly
> uses the_repository. Replace this with strbuf_repo_path() to get a
> path buffer we control that uses a given repository pointer.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>

Regarding the first 4 patches, it would be great if there was a test like the one in test_repository.c (together with a code coverage report, perhaps) that verifies that all code paths do not use the_repository.

But set aside that test for now - I don't think gc.c fully supports arbitrary repositories. In particular, when running a subprocess, it inherits the environment from the current process. I see that future patches try to resolve this by passing "-C", but that does not work if environment variables like GIT_DIR are set (because the environment variables override the "-C"). Perhaps we need a function that runs a subprocess in a specific repository. I ran into the same problem when attempting to make fetch-pack (which runs index-pack as a subprocess) support arbitrary repositories, but I haven't looked deeply into resolving this yet (and I haven't looked at that problem in a while).

Having said that, I'm fine with these patches being in the set - the only negative is that perhaps a reader would be misled into thinking that GC supports arbitrary repositories.