Re: [PATCH 3/5] cat-file: disable refs/replace with --batch-all-objects

> When we're enumerating all objects in the object database, it doesn't
> make sense to respect refs/replace. The point of this option is to
> enumerate all of the objects in the database at a low level. By
> definition we'd already show the replacement object's contents (under
> its real oid), and showing those contents under another oid is almost
> certainly working against what the user is trying to do.

> So it has worked reliably this way for over 7 years, and we should make
> sure it continues to do so. That could also be an argument that
> --batch-all-objects should not change behavior (which this patch is
> doing), but I really consider the current behavior to be an unintended
> bug. It's a side effect of how the code is implemented (feeding the oids
> back into oid_object_info() rather than looking at what we found while
> reading the loose and packed object storage).

> The implementation is straight-forward: we just disable the global
> read_replace_refs flag when we're in --batch-all-objects mode. It would
> perhaps be a little cleaner to change the flag we pass to
> oid_object_info_extended(), but that's not enough. We also read objects
> via read_object_file() and stream_blob_to_fd(). The former could switch
> to its _extended() form, but the streaming code has no mechanism for
> disabling replace refs. Setting the global flag works, and as a bonus,
> it's impossible to have any "oops, we're sometimes replacing the object
> and sometimes not" bugs in the output (like the ones caused by
> 98e2092b50 above).