Subject: Re: [PATCH 7/7] builtin/maintenance: fix auto-detach with non-standard tasks

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 13:59:37 +0200

On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 12:29:47PM +0100, Phillip Wood wrote:
> Hi Patrick
> 
> On 13/08/2024 08:18, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> > 
> > Fix this bug by asking git-gc(1) to not detach when it is being invoked
> > via git-maintenance(1). Instead, the latter command now respects a new
> > config "maintenance.autoDetach", the equivalent of "gc.autoDetach", and
> > detaches itself into the background if not told otherwise. This should
> > continue to behave the same for all users which use the git-gc(1) task,
> > only. For others though, it means that we now properly perform all tasks
> > in the background.
> 
> I fear that users who are running "git maintenance" from a scheduler such as
> cron are likely to be surprised by this change in behavior. At the very
> least "git maintenance" will no-longer return a meaningful exit code.
> Perhaps we could switch the logic to be opt in and pass "--detach" (or "-c
> maintenance.autoDetach=true") when running "git maintenance" automatically
> from "git rebase" etc.

It's actually the reverse: the old behaviour when run via a scheduler
was to detach by default, because git-gc(1) did. We now ask it to not
detach anymore, which fixes this. Furthermore, the default behaviour of
`git maintenance run` did not change either: it stays in the foreground
unless the `--detach` flag is given. So the thing you worry about is
actually getting fixed by this series :)

What _does_ change though is when we run `git maintenance` via our
auto-maintenance framework. Here we now do detach the whole maintenance
process, instead of only git-gc(1). This logic is only being executed by
random commands (git-rebase, git-pull, git-commit etc), and I'd argue it
is the expected behaviour.

Patrick