Re: [PATCH 5/6] Teach "fsck" not to follow subproject links

Linus Torvalds wrote:

Yes.

The issues for hosting sites are very different from the issues of 
individual developers having their own git repositories, and I agree 100% 
that both alternates and shared object directories make tons of sense for 
hosting.

quoted

Below I talk about a possible way we could use git
without changing it (since I recognize this would be a minority usage
pattern).

I hope it wouldn't even be a minority usage pattern. I am a firm believer 
that distributed SCM's and git in particular makes a lot more sense for 
source control hosting than CVS or SVN do. I'm really disappointed with 
things like sourceforge, and part of the problem is literally that a 
centralized SCM is really *fundamentally* wrong for a hosting entity. 

Using a distributed SCM just makes _so_ much more sense for hosting 
projects, and I've actually very much wanted to try to make sure that git 
can help people who host things. 

And btw, I think the shared object model really works very well, but I 
think it has to be paired with some stricter rules than people who use 
their own repos tend to have. For example, end-point developers have 
become very used to rebasing and generally rewriting history (or just 
resetting to an older state), and that's something that works find in a 
"local repository" setup, but it's also the kinds of patterns that can 
really screw you in a hosted and shared-object environment.

Would it not make sense for a hosting environment to say, if you are 
using alternates, or shared object directories, then you need to include 
*all* the refs in *all* the projects if you ever do an fsck?

I'm not sure how well git will scale in this case, although it just 
should be a matter of how well git scales to dealing with a single 
project with tens of thousands of refs/tags/etc. The only problem might 
be in passing all those refs/tags to fsck in one go. STDIN, I guess?

Rogan