Re: [PATCH v6 09/40] Add initial external odb support

On Wed, 27 Sep 2017 18:46:30 +0200
Christian Couder [off-list ref] wrote:

I am ok to split the patch series, but I am not sure that 01/40 to
09/40 is the right range for the first patch series.
I would say that 01/40 to 07/40 is better as it can be seen as a
separate refactoring.

I mentioned 09/40 because this is (as far as I can tell) the first one
that introduces a new design.

I don't think single-shot processes would be a huge burden, because
the code is simpler, and because for example for filters we already
have single shot and long-running processes and no one complains about
that. It's code that is useful as it makes it much easier for people
to do some things (see the clone bundle example).

In fact in Git development we usually start to by first implementing
simpler single-shot solutions, before thinking, when the need arise,
to make it faster. So a perhaps an equally valid opinion could be to
first only submit the patches for the single-shot protocol and later
submit the rest of the series when we start getting feedback about how
external odbs are used.

My concern is that, as far as I understand about the Microsoft use case,
we already know that we need the faster solution, so the need has
already arisen.

And yeah I could change the order of the patch series to implement the
long-running processes first and the single-shot process last, so that
it could be possible to first get feedback about the long-running
processes, before we decide to merge or not the single-shot stuff, but
I don't think it would look like the most logical order.

My thinking was that we would just implement the long-running process
and not implement the single-shot process at all (besides maybe a script
in contrib/). If we are going to do both anyway, I agree that we should
do the single-shot process first.

quoted

And another possible issue is that we design ourselves into a corner.
Thinking about the use cases that I know about (the Android use case and
the Microsoft GVFS use case), I don't think we are doing that - for
Android, this means that large blob metadata needs to be part of the
design (and this patch series does provide for that), and for Microsoft
GVFS, "get" is relatively cheap, so a configuration option to not invoke
"have" first when loading a missing object might be sufficient.

If the helper does not advertise the "have" capability, the "have"
instruction will not be sent to the helper, so the current design is
already working for that case.

Ah, that's good to know.

quoted

And I think that my design can be extended to support a use case in
which, for example, blobs corresponding to a certain type of filename
(defined by a glob like in gitattributes) can be excluded during
fetch/clone, much like --blob-max-bytes, and they can be fetched either
through the built-in mechanism or through a custom hook.

Sure, we could probably rebuild something equivalent to what I did on
top of your design.
My opinion though is that if we want to eventually get to the same
goal, it is better to first merge something that get us very close to
the end goal and then add some improvements on top of it.

I agree - I mentioned that because I personally prefer to review smaller
patch sets at a time, and my patch set already includes a lot of the
same infrastructure needed by yours - for example, the places in the
code to dynamically fetch objects, exclusion of objects when fetching or
cloning, configuring the cloned repo when cloning, fsck, and gc.

quoted

 - I get compile errors when I "git am" these onto master. I think
   '#include "config.h"' is needed in some places.

It's strange because I get no compile errors even after a "make clean"
from my branch.
Could you show the actual errors?

I don't have the error messages with me now, but it was something about
a function being implicitly declared. You will probably get these errors
if you sync past commit e67a57f ("config: create config.h", 2017-06-15).

quoted

Any reason why you prefer to update the loose object functions than to
update the generic one (sha1_object_info_extended)? My concern with just
updating the loose object functions was that a caller might have
obtained the path by iterating through the loose object dirs, and in
that case we shouldn't query the external ODB for anything.

You are thinking about fsck or gc?
Otherwise I don't think it would be clean to iterate through loose object dirs.

Yes, fsck and gc (well, prune, I think) do that. I agree that Git
typically doesn't do that (except for exceptional cases like fsck and
gc), but I was thinking about supporting existing code that does that
iteration, not introducing new code that does that.