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[NOTES 06/11] Repository maintenance long-term goals

From
Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Date
Oct 6, 2025, 19:19 UTC
Message-ID
<aOQWS+ZJdXr73PE0@nand.local>
In-Reply-To
<aOQVeVYY6zadPjln@nand.local>
Topic: Repository maintenance long-term goals
Leader: Taylor Blau
* Taylor's talk was limited towards the end. Could expand on that future work.
* Constant repacking into a single pack was historically the major problem.
* Doing that less (because of geometric repacking) helps, but it's still a
	potential issue when it does occur. Gets them 98% of the way.
* Future items were geometric reachability, ?, best effort gc
* Previously during geometric, used to accumulate loose objects too. 6 months
	ago they changed to an approach where the big cruft pack could be excluded
	from the midx.
* Challenge would be to do a full complete repack without rewriting all of the
	midx chain.
* Because bitmap is tied to object order in a pack, need something like
	tombstones to not break the bitmaps. Need the tombstone to know that we don't
	have the data.
* Unitary midx idea - Taylor designed the chained midx before he figured out the
	repacking strategy. MIDX and pack index duplicate the data. No reason to
	de-dup other than for space saving. Could even skip having idx, but plenty of
	old git versions can't read midx.
* brian - there may be other implementations, such as git lfs, that don't use
	midx and object id mappings in pack idx v3 aren't supported in midx either.
* Nothing preventing you from having two parallel repacks, one that's geometric
	and one that's trying to do an all-into-one.
Previous: Taylor BlauNext: Taylor Blau
Message 7 of 12 in “Notes from the Git Contributor's Summit, 2025”
  1. Taylor BlauOct 6, 2025
  2. 01/11 SHA-256 and interoperability workTaylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025
  3. 02/11 First-class conflicts in Git?Taylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025
  4. 03/11 The future of history rewriting - rebase, replay and history (+Change-IDs)Taylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025
  5. 04/11 RustTaylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025
  6. 05/11 Pluggable object databasesTaylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025
  7. 06/11 Repository maintenance long-term goalsTaylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025
  8. 07/11 Change-ID Header in GitTaylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025
  9. 08/11 Resumable fetch / pushTaylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025
  10. 09/11 Git 3.0Taylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025
  11. 10/11 How can companies respectfully engage contractors to work on Git?Taylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025
  12. 11/11 Conservancy 2025 updatesTaylor Blau, Oct 6, 2025

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