Subject: Re: MIDX woes, was Re: [ANNOUNCE] Git v2.54.0-rc2

From: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:23:19 -0400

On Thu, Apr 16, 2026 at 01:12:50PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Looking at the later part of load_multi_pack_index_one() function,
> it is full of die() calls, not prepared to degrade gracefully at
> all.

OK, I confess I did not look past the two goto calls below the lines I
touched, since I didn't think we'd be applying it immediately anyway.

> The reason why I do not think reword is worth doing is that as far
> as this function (i.e., "Here is an MIDX file---please read it and
> give me struct multi_pack_index back") is concerned, these error
> returns are giving diagnosis on the nature of errors.  Sometimes we
> cannot learn the length of the file, sometimes we find that the file
> is unreasonably short, sometimes it is not sorted properly, etc.
> None of the existing "error + cleanup" says "we are continuing
> anyway" and that is good.  The decision to keep going without using
> midx file (or not) belongs to the caller, so if we wanted to say
> that, we should say so in the caller, not here.

Yep, I agree with all of that.

-Peff