Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 2/5] config doc: unify the description of fsck.* and receive.fsck.*

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 May 2018 09:20:58 +0200

On Wed, May 30 2018, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 11:45 AM, Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>> If the project has some tool constraints and have to accept new
>>> "broken" objects on ongoing basis, then fsck.<msg-id> facility may
>>> make sense, but that is probably a very narrow special use case.
>>
>> That makes sense. I'll reword this bit.
>> ...
>> I'll try to clarify this, but I think we really should have some bit
>> there about historical tools. Realistically no new git tools produce
>> these, so the user needs to be made aware of what the trade-off of
>> turning these on is.
>>
>> The reality of that is that these objects are exceedingly rare, and
>> mostly found in various old repositories. Something like that need to
>> be mentioned so the user can weigh the trade-off of turning this on.
>
> Rare or not, once we say "avoid fsck.<msg-id> unless you have a good
> reason not to", wouldn't that be sufficient?

It's our documentation that should be clearly stating those reasons. If
we're not saying anything about these being historical bugs, then e.g. I
(not knowing the implementation) wouldn't have turned this on globally
on my site knowing that because I have none of these now I'm *very*
unlikely to have them in the future.

That's different from something that just happens rarely, because a rare
non-historical event can be expected to happen in the future.

> Between "fsck.<msg-id> makes sense only when you use these rare and
> you-probably-never-heard-of tools ongoing basis" and "when you
> already have (slightly)broken objects, naming each of them in
> skiplist, rather than covering the class, is better because you want
> *new* instances of the same breakage", I'd imagine the latter would be
> more helpful.
>
> In any case, let's see if there are more input to this topic and
> then wrap it up in v3 ;-)
>
> Thanks.