Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 05/19] midx: teach `nth_midxed_object_oid()` about incremental MIDXs

From: Taylor Blau <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2024 15:03:29 -0400

On Thu, Aug 01, 2024 at 05:38:05AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> To some degree I think the proof will be in the pudding. If you missed
> any helpers, then the end result is going to crash and burn quite badly
> when used with a chained midx, and we'd see it in the test suite. And
> the nice thing is that most of this is abstracted inside these helpers,
> so we know the set of tricky places is generally limited to the helpers,
> and not arbitrary bits of midx code.

I think back in the old days, I might have considered experimenting with
GitHub's fork of Git to build up this feature before sharing it with the
list.

But experience has taught me that it's far better to share early and
often. Doing so gets you the benefit of having many eyes on the feature,
not just from individuals at GitHub.

Selfishly, it also reduces the pain of having to change some on-disk
format that has already been widely rolled out within GitHub's
infrastructure and similar, but the former motivation is much more
compelling.

In terms of "the pudding" here, I think that marking this feature as
experimental / incomplete is a good way for us to push this forward and
build up some real-world experience with brave users via a tagged
version of Git. Then we can refine it until we are confident it has
graduated the "experimental" phase.

Thanks,
Taylor