Re: [PATCH 0/9] Multiple remotes without conflicts

On Thursday 18 March 2010 20:07:12 Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Andreas Gruenbacher [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

I'm still trying to find a simple and painless way of sharing the object
store among multiple repositories: the idea is to have a "parent"
repository which contains the actual object store, and a number of
"child" repositories which link to that object store.  The obvious
problem is garbage collection: we can only garbage collect the parent
once it has all refs of all its children.

One way of ensuring that is to make each child a "remote" of the parent,
and to fetch all remotes first.  This works for branches, but not for
tags or for the reflog.

This just feels like the wrong solution.

Why can't we have a "$GIT_DIR/children" subdirectory with a symlink
or file-containing-path to each child repository.  Modify the fsck
and gc paths to include these additional reference and reflog spaces,
and that's that.

Child registration is then just a matter of installing the symlink
in the parent, or removing it, and gc/fsck never needs to worry
about a fetch up front in order for it to be accurate.

Another way would be to add some kind of "child" flag to remotes, and to teach 
gc to fetch such children before doing its work (or check that they are up-to-
date).  I think it's much nicer to construct the "parent" repository in such a 
way that it includes all relevant refs locally: it will just look and behave 
like a "normal" repository.

Thanks,
Andreas