Re: [RFC/PATCH 2/2] repack: Remove stale .keep files before repacking

[Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>]

On Friday 01 April 2011, Jeff King wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 01, 2011 at 03:34:27AM +0200, Johan Herland wrote:
> > On Thursday 31 March 2011, Jeff King wrote:
> > > On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 12:46:25PM +0200, Johan Herland wrote:
> > > > 3. Do I need to scan for and remove stale .keep files in a cron job
> > > >    in order to keep repos healthy and clonable?
> > > 
> > > If we fix (1), then hopefully it is not as much of an issue. But
> > > probably "git gc" should clean up stale ones after a while.
> > 
> > This patch tries to automatically remove stale .keep files. However,
> > it's still work-in-progress, as I don't know how to portably (a) ask
> > for the current hostname (so that I can compare it to the one in the
> > .keep file), or (b) test for whether a given PID is running on the
> > system (to determine whether the receive-pack process that wrote the
> > .keep file is still alive).
> > 
> > Feedback appreciated.
> 
> Since your 1/2 turns them from an actual problem into just harmless
> cruft, there's no real rush to get rid of them. Could we just do
> something like "there is no matching pack file, and the mtime is 2 weeks
> old"?

True, except that in the case I encountered (and reported) yesterday, I 
believe there _was_ a matching .pack file...

> If there is a matching pack file, I don't think we want to get rid of
> them.

AFAICS, in this case we do.

> People can have .keep files if they want to indicate the pack
> should be kept. I do admit it would be weird to write the "receive-pack"
> message into them, though.

Yeah, I don't think we have to worry about that, and even if we do, we are 
free to change the "receive-pack ..." string into something far less likely 
to generate a false positive.


...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, <johan@herland.net>
www.herland.net