On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 11:19:58AM +0200, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

  - Fix the "onbranch" recursion properly: instead of papering over the
    issue, this series now refactors reference store initialization to
    not read any configuration at all anymore. Instead, the config is
    now parsed lazily. This fixes the recursion, but also makes us
    respect configuration guarded by "onbranch" conditions properly.

Sorry, I was offline and missed reviewing some of the intermediate
stages.

The approach you take in v6 looks good to me, and I'm glad the result
does not look too painful to maintain. If we ever add a config option
that is absolutely required for initializing the reading side of the
backends, we'll be back to our chicken-and-egg problem. But I won't be
surprised if that never happens, and if it does, we can decide on the
user-visible interaction with onbranch includes then (and whatever the
result is, document it).

Thanks for taking the time to re-work all of this.

-Peff