Re: [PATCH 00/15] [RFC] Maintenance jobs and job runner

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

> If there are periodic tasks that should be done, even if only on large
> repos, then let's have a git gc --periodic that does them.  I'm not sure
> that fetch should be in that set, but nothing prevents users from doing
> "git fetch origin && git gc --periodic".  Let's make it as simple and
> straightforward as possible.

Yeah, thanks for bringing up "git gc" here.  Earlier I mumbled
sometrhing about "git repack", which seemed to have needlessly
muddied the discussion, but "gc" is exactly the "we already have a
wrapper the users are familiar with---why not extend it" thing.

> I'm not opposed to seeing a tool that can schedule periodic maintenance
> jobs, perhaps in contrib, depending on whether other people think it
> should go.  However, I think running periodic jobs is best handled on
> Unix with cron or anacron and not a custom tool or a command in Git.
>
> I've dealt with systems that implemented periodic tasks without using
> the existing tools for doing that, and I've found that usually that's a
> mistake.  Despite seeming straightforward, there are a lot of tricky
> edge cases to deal with and it's easy to get wrong.
>
> We also don't have to reimplement all the features in the system
> scheduler and can let expert users use a different tool of their choice
> instead if cron (or the Windows equivalent) is not to their liking.

;-)  You said it much better than I would have myself.  Thanks.