Re: [PATCH v3 0/8] Hiding refs

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 5, 2013, 17:27 UTC
Message-ID: <7v8v72u0vw.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <5110BD18.3080608@alum.mit.edu>

Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> I would again like to express my discomfort about this feature, which is
> already listed as "will merge to next".

Do not take "will merge to next" too literally. One major purpose of marking a topic as such is exactly to solicit comments like this ;-)

> * I didn't see a response to Peff's convincing arguments that this
> should be a client-side feature rather than a server-side feature [1].

Uncluttering is not about a choice client should make. "delayed advertisement" is an orthogonal issue and requires a larger protocol update (it needs to make "git fetch" speak first instead of the current protocol in which "upload-pack" speaks first).

> * I didn't see an answer to Duy's question [2] about what is different
> between the proposed feature and gitnamespaces.

I think Jonathan addressed this already.

> * I didn't see a response to my worries that this feature could be
> abused [3].

You can choose not to advertise allow-tip-sha1-in-want capability; I do not think it is making things worse than the status quo.

> * Why should a repository have exactly one setting for what refs should
> be hidden?  Wouldn't it make more sense to allow multiple "views" to be
> defined?:

You are welcome to extend to have different views, but how would your clients express which view they would want?

Giving a single view that the serving end decides gives us an immediate benefit of showing an uncluttered set of refs of server's choice, without making the problem space larger than necessary.

> * Is it enough to support only reference exclusion (as opposed to
> exclusion and inclusion rules)?

Again, I do not think you cannot extend it to do positive and negative filtering "exclude these, but include those even though they match the 'exclude these' patterns I gave you earlier".

> * Why should this feature only be available remotely?

The whole point is to give the server side a choice to show selected refs, so that it can use hidden portion for its own use. These refs should not be hidden from local operations like "gc".

I appreciate the comments, but I do not think any point you raised in this message is very much relevant as objections.