"Shawn O. Pearce" [off-list ref] writes:
I almost submitted a patch to do that tonight, but I couldn't decide
on behavior: should we scan known packs, then try for loose, then
scan packs again until no object or no new pack is found? Probably.
Hmmm. Probably.
But I tend to think that this particular failure scenario is
probably rare enough that plugging this in "the right way" is
not a high priority. We should definitely revisit it post
1.5.0.
Also if we are adding a bitfield, I think pack_local should also
become one, as it currently wastes a whole word to hold one bit
(on the other hand if we do not want to add a field I think a
different negative value in pack_fd could mean "do not bother to
look at it again").