Re: [PATCH 9/9] refs: add a '--required' flag to 'git refs optimize'

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 13, 2025, 14:37 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqh5w250lw.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqwm4y538p.fsf@gitster.g>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> Perhaps "--check-" followed by a word specific to what we are trying
> to achieve (e.g., if we are trying to see if auto-compaction is
> necessary, "--check-for-auto" "check for auto compaction")?  I
> dunno.

After reading what you did in the previou step, I am reasonably sure "required" is a wrong word to use, with or without other words like "check". Semantically it is similar to the should_pack_refs() check that we use for pack-refs even before "optimize" came. We expect it to answer this question cheaply: are we better off if we repacked, or can we go on without repacking for now? It is not about "are we performing so poorly that we MUST optimize now?"

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.