Re: [PATCH v3 0/8] pack-objects: Create an alternative name hash algorithm (recreated)

From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 24, 2025, 17:45 UTC
Message-ID: <7fe5f33c-4923-42a4-b98e-e7c2116a2782@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <Z5F/JdnSAYqUBJ8s@nand.local>

On 1/22/25 6:28 PM, Taylor Blau wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 21, 2025 at 03:21:15PM -0500, Derrick Stolee wrote:

> Sorry that I punted on reviewing this for way longer than I should have,
> and thanks for bearing with me.

I wanted to give people time to recover from release mechanics before poking this series again. Thanks for reviewing so quickly after my message.

> I left a handful of comments on the patches themselves, but they are
> mostly cosmetic.

Thanks. I have prepped a v4 with those cosmetic updates and will intend to send it on Monday, unless there are more comments before then.

> After reviewing, I think the idea of having a versioned name-hash is a
> good one, and I agree that it'll make the eventual .bitmap changes much
> easier to implement.

Thanks!

[I reordered a paragraph below]

> My idle thought before having a chance to review this
> series is that the --name-hash-version option was handing over too much
> control to the user without clear instruction on when to use one version
> over the other.

...

Show 6 quoted lines

> So I think in that sense exposing a `--name-hash-version` is the right
> thing to do. My feeling is that we should probably just add Jonathan's
> "v2", since it appears to be a improvement in nearly all cases against
> v1, and more often an improvement than not when compared to v3. In that
> world, just introducing v2 leaves us with less code to maintain and
> fewer, clearer options presented to users.

I think these ideas are related. The thought that really convinced me that v3 isn't worth it right now is that users won't know which version to use without some kind of opinion being voiced by tooling. If users assume that "newer is better" then they may accidentally get into a worse situation by defaulting to v3 over v2. It's unsatisfying to say "try both and see which is better" especially when v3 is rarely better.

I'll drop the last patch in the next version, but I'll keep it in my fork for possible future resurrection.

Thanks, -Stolee