Re: What's cooking in git.git (Jan 2024, #01; Tue, 2)

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 08:37:59AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> This is totally unrelated tangent, but the way "show-index" gets
> invoked in the above loop makes readers wonder how the caller found
> out which $idx file to read.
> 
> Of course, the above loop sits downstream of a pipe
> 
>     find .git/objects/pack -type f -name \*.idx
> 
> which means that any user of "git show-index" must be intimately
> familiar with how the object database is structured.  I wonder if we
> want an extra layer of abstraction, similar to how the reference
> database can have different backend implementation.

I assume you mean a test helper by "extra layer of abstraction".

That could make sense, though I think this is just the tip of the
iceberg. There are a bazillion tests that muck with .git/objects/
directly (especially ones finding and munging loose objects). So it
wouldn't do much good until we know what cases the abstract code would
have to handle. And I don't think we have any concrete alternative yet
to the current object-dir layout.

So I think we should just punt on it for now. Adding one case here is
not making a hypothetical abstraction layer significantly harder to add
later.

-Peff