[NOTES 06/11] Repository maintenance long-term goals
From: Taylor Blau <hidden>
Date: 2025-10-06 19:19:41
Topic: Repository maintenance long-term goals Leader: Taylor Blau * Taylor's talk was limited towards the end. Could expand on that future work. * Constant repacking into a single pack was historically the major problem. * Doing that less (because of geometric repacking) helps, but it's still a potential issue when it does occur. Gets them 98% of the way. * Future items were geometric reachability, ?, best effort gc * Previously during geometric, used to accumulate loose objects too. 6 months ago they changed to an approach where the big cruft pack could be excluded from the midx. * Challenge would be to do a full complete repack without rewriting all of the midx chain. * Because bitmap is tied to object order in a pack, need something like tombstones to not break the bitmaps. Need the tombstone to know that we don't have the data. * Unitary midx idea - Taylor designed the chained midx before he figured out the repacking strategy. MIDX and pack index duplicate the data. No reason to de-dup other than for space saving. Could even skip having idx, but plenty of old git versions can't read midx. * brian - there may be other implementations, such as git lfs, that don't use midx and object id mappings in pack idx v3 aren't supported in midx either. * Nothing preventing you from having two parallel repacks, one that's geometric and one that's trying to do an all-into-one.