Re: [RFC] git gc "--prune=now" semantics considered harmful

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jun 1, 2018, 11:07 UTC
Message-ID: <CA+55aFz5cwZa_PWMV2aGv0TGBpBz8OUB-dPvdwv4ouQs1t1mzA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20180601070456.GB15578@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 2:04 AM Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> We'd also accept relative times like "5.minutes.ago" (in fact, the
> default is a relative 2.weeks.ago, though it's long enough that the
> difference between "2 weeks" and "2 weeks plus 5 minutes" may not matter
> much). So we probably ought to just normalize _everything_ without even
> bothering to match "now". It's a noop for non-relative times, but that's
> OK.

Heh. That's what I tried to do at first.

It's surprisingly hard.

You can't normalize it as a date, because we have a few times that aren't expressible as dates because they are just the maximum value (ie "all").

And then I tried to just express it just as a standard numerical value, which we accept on input. But we *only* accept that if it's more than eight digits.

And regardless, you need to special-case "now", since parse_expiry_date() special cases it.

Or you'd need to just make another version of parse_expiry_date() entirely.

End result: I only special-cased "now".

> There are still possibilities for a race, even with the grace period.

Agreed. But you *really* have to work at it.

              Linus