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

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

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"?

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

-Peff