Re: [PATCH 0/7] [RFC] Maintenance III: background maintenance

On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 05:16:41PM +0000, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote:

This is based on ds/maintenance-part-2, but with some local updates to
review feedback. It won't apply cleanly right now. This RFC is for early
feedback and not intended to make a new tracking branch until v2.

This RFC is intended to show how I hope to integrate true background
maintenance into Git. As opposed to my original RFC [1], this entirely
integrates with cron (through crontab [-e|-l]) to launch maintenance
commands in the background.

[1] 
https://lore.kernel.org/git/pull.597.git.1585946894.gitgitgadget@gmail.com/ (local)

Some preliminary work is done to allow a new --scheduled option that
triggers enabled tasks only if they have not been run in some amount of
time. The timestamp of the previous run is stored in the 
maintenance.<task>.lastRun config value while the interval is stored in the 
maintenance.<task>.schedule config value.

This changes the config file from read-mostly to continuously updated. Is
that desirable?
In particular it significanly increases the risk of race with the user
editing the file.
I think timestamps are not configuration and should be written to some
other file.
Or is there already a core git feature that continuously updates the
config file?

Thanks

Michal