Re: ls-refs protocol extension

From: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Date: Jan 25, 2021, 01:04 UTC
Message-ID: <YA4ZOOccXK0YEOWu@nand.local>
In-Reply-To: <CAJsFKUCuvO7Y7-MJZ-GG9Jv+4-ei=-tvx4PF1PbeU61m+CV9RA@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 01:40:08PM +0100, Christian Schilling wrote:

> Hi list,
> I have been working on a custom git server where the sha values
> required to respond to a ls-refs command can occasionally be expensive
> to compute.

Almost certainly the expensive part of ls-refs is actually traversing the references, not parsing the objects they point at and determining their hash.

Incidentally, we had a discussion recently [1] that resulted in some patches that make it so that ls-refs often only has to read through part of the refs in your repository, not all of them.

> It would be a great improvement of user experience if it was possible
> to show progress to the user while this is happening.

It's possible that that might help, but honestly I'd be surprised if there was a real use-case that needed it (especially after the patches that I mentioned which should make it fast enough that you don't have to care :-)).

Thanks, Taylor

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/20210119144251.27924-1-jacob@gitlab.com/