Re: should git maintenance prefetch be taught to honor remote.fetch refspec?

From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 1, 2021, 19:07 UTC
Message-ID: <d246df21-fdaa-a391-847a-e03e8e664af1@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20210401184914.qmr7jhjbhp2mt3h6@dhcp-10-154-148-175.vpn.oracle.com>

On 4/1/2021 2:49 PM, Tom Saeger wrote:

> I've recently setup git maintenance and noticed prefetch task
> fetches ALL remote refs (well not tags) and does not honor
> remote fetch config settings.

This is intentional. The point is to get the latest objects without modifying any local copies of refs. You still need to run "git fetch" manually to update the refs, but that should be faster because you have most of the objects already in your copy of the repository.

Here is the essential part of the documentation [1]:

	The refmap is custom to avoid updating local or
	remote branches (those in refs/heads or refs/remotes).
	Instead, the remote refs are stored in
	refs/prefetch/<remote>/. Also, tags are not updated.

	This is done to avoid disrupting the remote-tracking
	branches. The end users expect these refs to stay
	unmoved unless they initiate a fetch. With prefetch
	task, however, the objects necessary to complete a
	later real fetch would already be obtained, so the real
	fetch would go faster. In the ideal case, it will just
	become an update to a bunch of remote-tracking branches
	without any object transfer.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-maintenance#Documentation/git-maintenance.txt-prefetch

Thanks, -Stolee