Re: auto-packing on kernel.org? please?

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Chuck Lever wrote:
>
> there are some things repacking does that breaks StGIT, though.
> 
> git repack -d
> 
> seems to remove old commits that StGIT was still depending on.

If that is true, then "git-fsck-cache" probably also reports errors on a 
StGIT repository. No? Basically, it implies that the tool doesn't know how 
to find all the "heads".

Could somebody (Catalin?) perhaps tell how tools like git-fsck-cache and 
git-repack could figure out which objects are still in use by stgit?

Preferably with some generic mechanism that _other_ projects (not just 
stgit) might want to use?

The preferred way would be to just list the references somewhere under 
.git/refs/stgit, in which case fsck and repack should pick them up 
automatically (so clearly stgit doesn't do that right now ;).

It also implies that doing a "git prune" will do horribly bad things to a 
stgit repo, since it would remove all the objects that it thinks aren't 
reachable..

> git repack -a -n
> 
> seems to work fine with StGIT,

Well, it "works", but not "fine". Since it doesn't know about the stgit 
objects, it won't ever pack them.

But maybe that's what stgit wants (since they are "temporary"), but it 
does mean that if you see a big advantage from packing, you might be 
losing some of it.

		Linus