Re: [PATCH 1/7] setup: extract function to create the refdb

> On Wed, Dec 06, 2023 at 10:10:37PM +0100, Karthik Nayak wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 6, 2023 at 1:40 PM Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> wrote:
>> > +       /*
>> > +        * We need to create a "refs" dir in any case so that older
>> > +        * versions of git can tell that this is a repository.
>> > +        */
>>
>> How does this work though, even if an earlier version of git can tell
>> that this is a repository, it still won't be able to read the reftable
>> backend. In that sense, what do we achieve here?
>
> This is a good question, and there is related ongoing discussion about
> this topic in the thread starting at [1]. There are a few benefits to
> letting clients discover such repos even if they don't understand the
> new reference backend format:
>
>   - They know to stop walking up the parent-directory chain. Otherwise a
>     client might end up detecting a Git repository in the parent dir.
>
>   - The user gets a proper error message why the repository cannot be
>     accessed. Instead of failing to detect the repository altogether we
>     instead say that we don't understand the "extensions.refFormat"
>     extension.
>
> Maybe there are other cases I can't think of right now.
> [1]: <ZWcOvjGPVS_CMUAk@tanuki>