Re: [PATCH] [RFC] Generational repacking

From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 7, 2007, 19:46 UTC
Message-ID: <46a038f90706071246y7dd14f55t199b8ed4e7617b68@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.99.0706062314410.12885@xanadu.home>

On 6/7/07, Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> wrote:

> Run git-repack without -a from some hook.  You can even launch it in the
> background.

I posted an RFC patch a while ago doing exactly that, and Linus shot it down, indicating we should instead print a message suggesting repack to the user.

Relevant thread around http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0606/22977.html

> Or what am I missing?

I don't think people were comfortable at the time with concurrent repacks -- though the semantics are safe if we don't hit any bug. My guess is that noone wants to risk the .001% chances of data corruption for this nice-to-have.

It was also probably a bad idea in my patch that it said -a -- it should just be

  git repack -l -q &

[And I generally agree with the concerns about possibly broken semantics, unexpected user actions and racing repacks. One of the main reasons I've never advocated SVN is that the early stories of data corruption using BDB backends made me very very very wary of it. Perhaps because I lot months of work in the past to disk corruption in a cvs repo, and have a good mental picture of the nervous breakdown that followed.]

cheers,