On Wed, May 03, 2023 at 03:59:06PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

On Tue, May 02, 2023 at 08:09:47PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:

quoted

However, there is no option to be able to keep around certain objects
that have otherwise aged out of the grace period. The only way to retain
those objects is:

  - to point a reference at them, which may be undesirable or
    infeasible,
  - to track them via the reflog, which may be undesirable since the
    reflog's lifetime is limited to that of the reference it's tracking
    (and callers may want to keep those unreachable objects around for
    longer)
  - to extend the grace period, which may keep around other objects that
    the caller *does* want to discard,
  - or, to force the caller to construct the pack of objects they want
    to keep themselves, and then mark the pack as kept by adding a
    ".keep" file.

OK, I understand the use case you're trying to support, and your
approach mostly makes sense. But there are two things I was surprised by
in the implementation:

  1. Does this need to be tied to cruft packs? The same logic would
     apply to "repack -A" which turns objects loose (of course you
     probably don't want to do that in the long term for performance
     reasons, but it's conceptually the same thing; see below).

I agree that you wouldn't want to do it for performance reasons, but I'm
comfortable with the asymmetry here, since this is `pack.extraCruftTips`
(emphasis on "cruft"), so it's not clear that it has to be related to
"repack -A".

Happy to change things up if you feel strongly, though.

Thanks,
Taylor