Re: [PATCH v3 1/8] maintenance: add prefetch task

From: Derrick Stolee <redacted>

When working with very large repositories, an incremental 'git fetch'
command can download a large amount of data. If there are many other
users pushing to a common repo, then this data can rival the initial
pack-file size of a 'git clone' of a medium-size repo.

Users may want to keep the data on their local repos as close as
possible to the data on the remote repos by fetching periodically in
the background. This can break up a large daily fetch into several
smaller hourly fetches.

The task is called "prefetch" because it is work done in advance
of a foreground fetch to make that 'git fetch' command much faster.

However, if we simply ran 'git fetch <remote>' in the background,
then the user running a foregroudn 'git fetch <remote>' would lose

-> foreground

I have some more minor comments that I will send as individual replies,
but overall, the patch set looks good to me.

+static int append_remote(struct remote *remote, void *cbdata)
+{
+	struct string_list *remotes = (struct string_list *)cbdata;
+
+	string_list_append(remotes, remote->name);
+	return 0;
+}
+
+static int maintenance_task_prefetch(struct maintenance_run_opts *opts)
+{
+	int result = 0;
+	struct string_list_item *item;
+	struct string_list remotes = STRING_LIST_INIT_DUP;
+
+	if (for_each_remote(append_remote, &remotes)) {
+		error(_("failed to fill remotes"));
+		result = 1;
+		goto cleanup;
+	}
+
+	for_each_string_list_item(item, &remotes)
+		result |= fetch_remote(item->string, opts);
+
+cleanup:
+	string_list_clear(&remotes, 0);
+	return result;
+}

I was wondering why the generation of the list and the iteration was
split up, but I see that you want to attempt to fetch each remote even
if one of them fails.