Re: [PATCH] t7700: demonstrate mishandling of objects in packs with a .keep file

Andreas Ericsson wrote:

drafnel@gmail.com wrote:

quoted

From: Brandon Casey <redacted>

Objects residing in pack files that have an associated .keep file are not
supposed to be repacked into new pack files, but they are.

I think that's a misconception. Packfiles that are marked with .keep files
should never be deleted. There are, afaik, no rules against packing the
same objects into other packfiles as well. This is nifty for dumb ref
walkers, as they can use a small pack for incremental fetching while using
a mega-pack for initial cloning.

Having no rules against an object residing in more than one pack is different
from intending for git to produce pack files with redundant objects.

I think one intention for the .keep mechanism was to allow for a size optimized
pack to be produced and distributed. Currently, if I am handed such a pack file,
I can not merely place it into my pack directory (along with the .idx and .keep
files) and then run git-gc to remove any redundancy. Instead, I would get
a _new_ pack file which would contain all of the objects in the repository and
effectively double the size of my objects store. That doesn't seem like
something a user would expect or should expect.

-brandon