Re: RFC: Design and code of partial clones (now, missing commits and trees OK)

On Thu, 21 Sep 2017 13:57:30 -0400
Jeff Hostetler [off-list ref] wrote:

There's a lot in this patch series.  I'm still studying it, but here
are some notes and questions.  I'll start with direct responses to
the RFC here and follow up in a second email with specific questions
and comments to keep this from being too long).

OK - thanks for your detailed comments.

I like that git-clone saves the partial clone settings in the
.git/config.  This should make it easier for subsequent commands to
default to the right settings.

Do we allow a partial-fetch following a regular clone (such that
git-fetch would create these config file settings)?  This seems like
a reasonable upgrade path for a user with an existing repo to take
advantage of partial fetches going forward.

A "git-fetch ...options... --save-options" does not sound unreasonable,
although I would think that (i) partial fetches/clones are useful on
very large repositories, and (ii) the fact that you had already cloned
this large repository shows that you can handle the disk and network
load, so partial fetch after non-partial clone doesn't seem very useful.

But if there is a use case, I think it could work. Although note that
the GC in my patch set stops at promisor objects, so if an object
originally cloned cannot be reached through a walk (with non-promisor
intermediate objects only), it might end up GC-ed (which might be fine).

Or do we require that git-fetch only be allowed to do partial-fetches
after a partial-clone (so that only clone creates these settings) and
fetch always does partial-fetches thereafter?  It might be useful to
allow fetch to do a full fetch on top of a partial-clone, but there
are probably thin-pack issues to work out first.

About the thin-pack issue, I wonder if it is sufficient to turn on
fetch_if_missing while index-pack is trying to fix the thin pack.

If the thin-pack issues are worked out, then non-partial fetch after
partial clone seems doable (all commits from our tip to their tip are
fetched, as well as all new trees and all new blobs; any trees and blobs
still missing are already promised).

Thanks for these questions - I am concentrating on repos in which both
clone and fetch are partial, but it is good to discuss what happens if
the user does something else.

Also, there is an assumption here that the user will want to keep
using the same filtering settings on subsequent fetches.  That's
probably fine for now and until we get a chance to try it out for
real.

Yes. Having said that, the fetching of missing objects does not take
into account the filter at all, so the filter can be easily changed.

Do we allow EXACTLY ONE promisor-remote?  That is, can we later add
another remote as a promisor-remote?  And then do partial-fetches from
either?

Yes, exactly one (because we need to know which remote to fetch missing
objects from, and which remote to allow partial fetches from). But the
promisor remote can be switched to another.

Do we need to disallow removing or altering a remote that is
listed as a promisor-remote?

Perhaps, although I think that right now configs are checked when we run
the command using the config, not when we run "git config".

I think for now, one promisor-remote is fine.  Just asking.

Changing a remote's URL might be fine, but deleting the
promisor-remote would put the user in a weird state.  We don't need
to worry about it now though.

Agreed.

I struggled with the terms here a little when looking at the source.
() A remote responding to a partial-clone is termed a
"promisor-remote". () Packfiles received from a promisor-remote are
marked with "<name>.promisor" like "<name>.keep" names.
() An object actually contained in such packfiles is called a
"promisor-object". () An object not-present but referenced by one of
the above promisor-objects is called a "promised-object" (aka a
"missing-object").

I think the similarity of the words "promisOR" and "promisED" threw
me here and as I was looking at the code.  The code in is_promised()
[1] looked like it was adding all promisor- and promised-objects to
the "promised" OIDSET, but I could be mistaken.

[1]
https://github.com/jonathantanmy/git/commit/7a9c2d9b6e2fce293817b595dee29a7eede0dddd#diff-5d5d5dc185ef37dc30bb7d9a7ae0c4e8R1960

I was struggling a bit with the terminology, true.

Right now I'm thinking of:
 - promisor remote (as you defined)
 - promisor packfile (as you defined)
 - promisor object is an object known to belong to the promisor (whether
   because we have it in a promisor packfile or because it is referenced
   by an object in a promisor packfile)

This might eliminate "promise(d)", and thus eliminate the confusion
between "promised" and "promisor", but I haven't done an exhaustive
search.

The contents of the "<name>.promisor" file are described as arbitrary?
Should we write the name of the remote (or some other structured data)
into this file so that later fetches can find the server?  This is
more a question for when we have multiple promisor-remotes and may
need to decide who can supply a missing object.  Not urgent now
though.

Yeah, I don't have a use for it right now. Although it might be a good
idea to make it future-proof, by say, declaring it to be lines of
key-value pairs (with comments)...but then again, we might need to
forbid earlier tools from working on such modern repositories, so we
would need a repository extension (or something similar), and we can
upgrade the format then.

I assume you mean that a dynamic fetch of a single tree object would
be unpacked upon receipt (rather than creating a one object packfile)
and that we may need to mark it as promisor-object so that missing
objects that *IT* references would still follow the promised-object
rules.

Yes, that's right. (And that it would not participate in GC.)

So is the assumption that as soon as you touch a promisOR-object you
might as well stop scanning, because anything it references might be
missing?


The code in rev-list.c and revision.c in [2] looks like it will
continue thru PROMISOR-objects and stop at (still-missing)
PROMISED-objects.

[2]
https://github.com/jonathantanmy/git/commit/2d7ae2bc780dd056552643e4f5061a0ca7b5b1e5

The invocation of for_each_packed_object() in prepare_revision_walk()
should mark all objects in promisor packs as uninteresting, so the
traversal should stop there (unless I'm misunderstanding something).

quoted

The object walk done by gc also stops at all promisor objects and
promised objects. Only non-promisor packfiles are deleted (if pack
deletion is requested); promisor packfiles are left alone. This
maintains the distinction between promisor packfiles and
non-promisor packfiles. (In the future, we might need to do
something more sophisticated with promisor packfiles.)

Seems like we could combine promisor-packfiles -- so, for example,
the net result of a complete repack might be one normal- and one
promisor-packfile.

Yes, that is a good next step. (I'm aiming for a minimum viable product
here so I didn't include that.)

Question: if the initial clone is a partial-clone, we will ONLY have
promisor-packfiles, right?  (Unless they later add a second regular
remote.) So fsck and GC will basically stop scanning immediately,
right? Likewise, repack will basically be disabled until we support
repacking promisor-packfiles, right?  So performance of the resulting
repo will deteriorate over time as subsequent partial-fetches pull in
more and more promisor-packfiles.

Files locally created are non-promisor objects, and will become
non-promisor packfiles when GC/repack is run.

As for performance, you are right. We'll need to make a way to combine
promisor packfiles after this.

quoted

Fetching of promised objects
----------------------------

When `sha1_object_info_extended()` (or similar) is invoked, it will
automatically attempt to fetch a missing object from the promisor
remote if that object is not in the local repository. For
efficiency, no check is made as to whether that object is a
promised object or not.

I don't understand this last statement.  A missing-object is assumed
to be a promised-object, but we don't check that.  By this do you
mean that is_promised() [1] is only used by commands like fsck and
not elsewhere?

Sorry, I meant not checked in sha1_object_info_extended(). Yes, fsck and
gc will check them.

The dynamic object fetching in fetch_object() [3] only fetches 1
object from the server.  This will spawn a transport process, network
connection (and authentication), a packfile download, and index-pack
or unpack for each object.

Perhaps this is just preliminary code, but I don't see how you can
adapt that model to be efficient.  Even using a long-running
background process to fetch individual blobs, it will still be
fetching blobs individually.  We do need to have dynamic object
fetching, but we should try to minimize its use; that is, to try have
higher-level mechanisms in place to predict and bulk prefetch missing
objects.

My plan is to have batch fetching. We would need to extend this command
by command, for example, my patch for batched checkout here:

https://github.com/jonathantanmy/git/commit/14f07d3f06bc3a1a2c9bca85adc8c42b230b9143

(I didn't update this for my newest patch set because I didn't figure
out a good way to deal with the possibility of missing trees, but
something like this could probably be done - for example, by only
batching blobs, and whenever we need to fetch a tree, automatically
fetch all objects to a certain depth, for example.)

Server incompatibility is not a problem because the server already
supports multiple objects per request. (Well, except the fetching trees
to a certain depth part.)

I guess it depends on how many missing-objects you expect the client
to have. My concern here is that we're limiting the design to the
"occasional" big file problem, rather than the more general scale
problem.

Do you have a specific situation in mind?

Also, relying on dynamic object fetching also means that operations,
like checkout, may now require a network connection.  Because we
don't know we need an object until we actually need it (and are
half-way thru some operation that the user thought was safe to do
off-line).

Yes, but I think this is expected when we're dealing with partial
clones.

Thanks,
Jeff

Thanks.