From: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2023 19:00:04 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] repack: fix geometric repacking with gitalternates
Message-ID: <ZCxztCEq0sZygZ25@nand.local>
In-Reply-To: <ZCxytq1esQWvjIz/@nand.local>

On Tue, Apr 04, 2023 at 02:55:50PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
> I think we reasonably could do something like ignoring non-local packs
> in `init_pack_geometry()` only when `-l` is given. That still runs into
> problems when trying to write a MIDX or MIDX bitmaps, so we should
> likely declare the combination "-l --write-midx --write-bitmap-index" as
> unsupported. For backwards compatibility, I think it would make sense to
> have "--no-local" be the default when `--geometric` is given (which is
> already the case, since po_args is zero-initialized).

When summarizing this message to colleagues at GitHub, I came up with
this TL;DR, which I figured may be useful to share:

  TL;DR: I think that this is a (much) more complicated problem than
  originally anticipated, but the easiest thing to do is to assume that
  git repack --geometric=<d> means git repack --geometric=<d> --no-local
  unless otherwise specified, and declare --geometric=<d> --local
  unsupported when used in conjunction with --write-midx or
  --write-bitmap-index.

Thanks,
Taylor