Re: [PATCH] Change 'Deltifying objects' to 'Delta compressing objects'

["Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 10:21:54PM -0400, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
> 
> > My eyes have gotten used to "Deltifying" but I have to admit that
> > in my early Git days I thought it looked damn odd.  Today I'm far
> > too familiar with Git to really notice this as a problem now.
> 
> OK, I will confess I found it a little odd at first, but I think it's a
> straightforward and playful extension of the language, which is
> something I like. But you know, we have the corporate git customers to
> think about these days. ;)

Heh.  Yeah, Git is gaining users on a daily basis.  Its good.  :)
 
> On a similar note, some complaints with progress meters, even after
> recent patches:
> 
>   - When fetching, one progress meter says "Indexing" which, while
>     technically true, is almost certainly blocking on "Downloading". In
>     fact, it is not clear from the existing messages exactly _when_ we
>     are downloading, and when we are just computing, which is something
>     I think a user might want to know. Objections to changing this
>     (though perhaps index-pack will need to be told when it is
>     downloading and when it is just indexing)? Objections to a
>     throughput indicator?

Yes!  I agree entirely.  This is actually not very difficult.

I think the only time we run `git-index-pack --stdin` is from within
git-fetch-pack and git-receive-pack.  These are the only two points
where index-pack's stdin is attached to a network socket and not
to a file.  Its also where you'd want this to say "Transferring",
"Uploading" or "Downloading".

Really the important one to change here is probably the call in
fetch-pack.c as that is the most visible and most time consuming
operation for the average user (think git-clone on a large project).

The same change probably should also be made for unpack-objects as
fetch-pack/receive-pack may have chosen to use that if the object
count is low and it wasn't instructed to keep the packfile.

>   - Running git-gc, we now get something like:
>       Counting objects: 62317, done.
>       Deltifying objects: 100% (18042/18042), done.
>       Writing objects: 100% (62317/62317), done.
>       Total 62317 (delta 43861), reused 61404 (delta 43036)
>       Pack pack-32f8ac40c1a5ec146e45c657cb16f53fdd354095 created.
>       Removing unused objects 100%...
>       Done.
>     Can we get rid of total statistics (I think this is useful for some
>     power users, but perhaps there should be a verbosity level), the
>     name of the pack file (same deal), and the totally useless "Done."?

Yea.  I keep forgetting to write a patch to do this.  I've had much
the same thought as you.

The verbosity should probably be controlled like merge-recursive's
is, but should default to not showing the "Total" line or the "Pack
.. created" line.  For the average user there isn't any valuable
information in either line.

I also think that the progress meter of git-prune-packed should be
fixed to use the standard progress meter system.  And maybe also
be delayed so it doesn't trip if its going to be very quick.

-- 
Shawn.