[PATCH 0/2] Maintenance: add pack-refs task

This patch series adds a new pack-refs task to the maintenance builtin. This operation already happens within git gc (and hence the gc task) but it is easy to extract. Packing refs does not delete any data, only collects loose objects into a combined file. This makes things faster in subtle ways, especially when a command needs to iterate through refs (especially tags).

Credit for inspiring this goes to Suolong, who asked for this to be added to Scalar [1]. I've been waiting instead to add it directly to Git and its background maintenance. Now is the time!

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/scalar/issues/382

I chose to add it to the incremental maintenance strategy at a weekly cadence. I'm not sure there is significant value to the difference between weekly and daily. It just seems to me that weekly is often enough. Feel free to correct me if you have a different opinion.

My hope is that this patch series could be used as an example for further extracting tasks out of the gc task and making them be full maintenance tasks. Doing more of these extractions could be a good project for a new contributor.

One thing that is not implemented in this series is a notion of the behavior for the pack-refs task during git maintenance run --auto. This could be added in the future, but I wanted to focus on getting this behavior into the incremental maintenance schedule.

Thanks, -Stolee

Derrick Stolee (2):
  maintenance: add pack-refs task
  maintenance: incremental strategy runs pack-refs weekly

 Documentation/config/maintenance.txt |  5 +++--
 Documentation/git-maintenance.txt    |  6 ++++++
 builtin/gc.c                         | 23 +++++++++++++++++++----
 t/t7900-maintenance.sh               | 24 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
 4 files changed, 52 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

base-commit: fb7fa4a1fd273f22efcafdd13c7f897814fd1eb9
Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-871%2Fderrickstolee%2Fmaintenance%2Fpack-refs-v1
Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-871/derrickstolee/maintenance/pack-refs-v1
Pull-Request: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/871