Re: [PATCH v2 08/24] midx: respect 'core.multiPackIndex' when writing

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 06:25:18PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:

> When writing a new multi-pack index, write_midx_internal() attempts to
> load any existing one to fill in some pieces of information. But it uses
> load_multi_pack_index(), which ignores the configuration
> "core.multiPackIndex", which indicates whether or not Git is allowed to
> read an existing multi-pack-index.
> 
> Replace this with a routine that does respect that setting, to avoid
> reading multi-pack-index files when told not to.
> 
> This avoids a problem that would arise in subsequent patches due to the
> combination of 'git repack' reopening the object store in-process and
> the multi-pack index code not checking whether a pack already exists in
> the object store when calling add_pack_to_midx().
> 
> This would ultimately lead to a cycle being created along the
> 'packed_git' struct's '->next' pointer. That is obviously bad, but it
> has hard-to-debug downstream effects like saying a bitmap can't be
> loaded for a pack because one already exists (for the same pack).

I'm not sure I completely understand the bug that this causes.

But another question: does this impact how

  git -c core.multipackindex=false multi-pack-index write

behaves? I.e., do we still write, but just avoid reading the existing
midx? That itself seems like a more sensible behavior (e.g., trying to
recover from a broken midx state).

-Peff