Re: Usability issue: "Your branch is up to date"

> On Wed, Feb 05, 2025 at 10:40:41AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> If the user, on the other hand, is interested in keeping track of
>> all these thousands of refs, "git fetch" would have to ask and
>> receive advertisement for all these thousands of refs anyway, and
>> at that point, recording the no-op update would be a very small
>> part of the problem, I suspect.  Besides, we have reftable that
>> would make this kind of problem easier to solve, no? ;-)
>
> Yeah, I was pondering whether to bring up reftables or not :) But
> indeed, with them it would be way more efficient, at least assuming that
> we write everything in a single transaction and not via multiple
> transactions. Which we generally don't in git-fetch(1) unless the user
> asks for `--atomic` because we allow for a subset of the updates to
> fail. Consequently, even with reftables we'd end up writing N separate
> updates, where N is the number of advertised refs.
>
> This is a known problem that we actually plan to fix. Karthik is working
> on support for "partial" transactions, where it is allowed that a subset
> of ref updates fails without impacting other refs where the update would
> succeed. With this in place we could then refactor git-fetch(1) to write
> the update with a single transaction, only, even in the non-atomic case.
>