Re: [RFC/PATCH 8/8] read-cache: unlink old sharedindex files

On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 5:12 PM, Duy Nguyen [off-list ref] wrote:

No. People could create an index file anywhere in theory. So you don't
know how many index files there are.

Maybe when an index file is created, its path and its sharedindex file
could be appended into a log file.
We could check this log file to see if we can remove sharedindex files.
We would need to remove the entries in this log file for the indexes
that are no longer there.

Or instead of one log file we could have a file for each index file in
a special directory called for example "indexinfo".
So we could just delete the file if its related index is no longer there.

It really depends. If the shared part is too small for old indexes, we
might as well unsplit them. In practice though, the only long-term
index file is $GIT_DIR/index. If we don't delete old shared index
files too close to their creation time, temp index files will go away.

We could treat $GIT_DIR/index specially so that if there are no temp
index files, there should be nothing in "indexinfo".