Re: git receive-pack deletes refs one at a time?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 01:46:05PM -0600, Nasser Grainawi wrote:

> > The underlying ref code is smart enough to coalesce all of the deletions
> > in a single transaction into a single write of the packed-refs file.
> > 
> > But historically, pushes do not do a single ref transaction because we
> > would allow the push for one ref to succeed while others failed. Later,
> > we added an "atomic" mode that does it all in a single transaction.
> > 
> > Try with "git push --atomic", which should be able to do it in a single
> > write.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Is there a way to get the bulk behavior without the all-or-nothing behavior?

No, I don't think so. In theory the ref backend code could have a
"non-atomic" flag that lets it do as much as possible of a single
transaction. But nobody has ever implemented that.

In practice, using "--atomic" shouldn't cause failures, unless you are
trying to delete refs that somebody else is modifying at the same time.

-Peff