What about kicking off a repack in the background at the ends of certain
commands? With an option to disable, of course. It could run at a low
priority and could even sleep a lot to avoid saturating the system's
disks -- since it'd be running asynchronously there should be no problem
if it takes longer to run.
Alternately, if it's possible to break the repack work up into chunks
that can be executed a bit at a time, you could do a small amount of
repacking very frequently (possibly still in the background) rather than
the whole thing at once. I suspect the nature of a repack, where you
presumably want everything loaded at once, would make that a challenge,
but it might not be impossible.
On the more general question...
IMO expecting end users to regularly perform what are essentially
database administration tasks (running git-gc is akin to rebuilding
indexes or packing tables on a DBMS) is naive. Heck, even database
administrators don't like to run database administration commands;
PostgreSQL added the "autovacuum" feature precisely because manual
periodic repacking (and the associated monitoring to figure out when to
do it) was too annoying for developers and DBAs. But you don't have to
look that far; anyone who has worked in IT can tell you horror stories
of users, including developers, whose computers have slowed to a crawl
because the users never bothered to defrag their hard disks. And that
affects *everything* the users do, not just version control operations!
It'll get worse as better UIs and tool integration become available and
git gains large numbers of users who are neither software developers nor
system administrators, and wouldn't know a packfile from a hole in the
ground. I'm talking web designers, graphic artists, mechanical
engineers, even managers and secretaries -- all of those people are in
git's ultimate target audience, even if it's not ready for them today.
None of them is going to be interested in doing random housekeeping
operations by hand, but they'll all appreciate a fast environment.
The fact that git sometimes stores your files individually in the .git
directory and sometimes bundles them together into big archives should
be an implementation detail that end-users don't have to worry about day
to day; git should do the right thing to remain fast under typical usage
scenarios, while leaving the plumbing exposed so people with atypical
usage can get their stuff done too.
-Steve
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
