Re: [PATCH 0/5] not making corruption worse

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

But it strikes me as weird that we consider the _tips_ of history to be
special for ignoring breakage. If the tip of "bar" is broken, we omit
it. But if the tip is fine, and there's breakage three commits down in
the history, then doing a clone is going to fail horribly, as
pack-objects realizes it can't generate the pack. So in practice, I'm
not sure how much you're buying with the "don't mention broken refs"
code.

I think this is a trade-off between strictness and convenience.  Is
it preferrable that every time you try to clone a repository you get
reminded that one of its refs point at a bogus object and you
instead have to do "git fetch $there" with a refspec that excludes
the broken one, or is it OK to allow clones and fetches silently
succeed as if nothing is broken?

If the breakage in the reachability chain is somewhere that affects
a branch that is actively in use by the project, with or without
hiding a broken tip, you will be hit by object transfer failure and
you need to really go in there and fix things anyway.  If it is just
a no-longer-used experimental branch that lost necessary objects,
it may be more convenient if the system automatically ignored it.

In some parts of the system there is a movement to make this trade
off tweakable (hint: what happened to the knobs to fsck that allow
certain kinds of broken objects in the object store?  did the topic
go anywhere?). This one so far lacked such a knob to tweak, and I
view your paranoia bit as such a knob.