From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 17:49:05 GMT
Subject: Re: Diagnosing stray/stale .keep files -- explore what is in a pack?
Message-ID: <xmqqr4892l0u.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACPiFCKeOYHUb22d_Ea0PcbU-uAn=fVAn0QP1qbLAiNh1KEoqQ@mail.gmail.com>

Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 4:12 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
>> We see these occasionally at GitHub, too. I haven't yet figured out a
>> definite cause, though whatever it is, it's relatively rare.
>
> Do you have a cleanup script to safely get rid of stale .keep and
> .lock files? I wonder what other stale bits merit a cleanup...

As long as we can reliably determine that it is safe to do so
without risking races, automatically cleaning .lock files is a good
thing to do.

Cleaning .keep files needs the same care and a bit more, though.
You of course have to be sure that no other concurrent process is in
the middle of doing something, but you also need to be sure that the
".keep" file is not a marker created by the end user to say "keep
this pack, do not subject its contents to repacking" after a careful
repacking of the stable part of the history.