Re: [PATCH] git: add --no-optional-locks option

quoted

There might be another option to cope with the situation:

 4. Teach all commands to spinlock / busywait shortly for important
     locks instead of giving up. In that case git-status rewriting
     the index ought to be fine?

We do have all the infrastructure in place to do a reasonable busywait
with backoff. I think the patch is roughly just:

diff --git a/read-cache.c b/read-cache.c
index 65f4fe8375..fc1ba122a3 100644
--- a/read-cache.c
+++ b/read-cache.c

@@ -1563,7 +1563,8 @@ static int read_index_extension(struct index_state *istate,

 int hold_locked_index(struct lock_file *lk, int lock_flags)
 {
-       return hold_lock_file_for_update(lk, get_index_file(), lock_flags);
+       return hold_lock_file_for_update_timeout(lk, get_index_file(),
+                                                lock_flags, 500);
 }

 int read_index(struct index_state *istate)

though I think there are a few sites which manually call
hold_lock_file_for_update() on the index that would need similar
treatment.