Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] odb: track commit graphs via object source

From: Derrick Stolee <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2025 14:29:50 -0400

On 9/4/2025 7:12 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
>> commit graphs are currently stored on the object database level. This
>> doesn't really make much sense conceptually, given that commit graphs
>> are specific to one object source. Furthermore, with the upcoming
>> pluggable object database effort, an object source's backend may not
>> evene have a commit graph in the first place but store that information
>> in a different format altogether.
>>
>> This patch series prepares for that by moving the commit graph from
>> `struct object_database` into `struct odb_source`.
> 
> Hmph, I am finding the above hard to agree with at the conceptual
> level.  In some future, we may use multiple object stores in a
> single repository.  Perhaps we would be storing older parts of
> history in semi-online storage while newer parts are stored in
> readily available storage.  But the side data structure that allows
> us to quickly learn who are parents of one commit is without having
> to go to the object store in order to parse the actualy commit
> object can be stored for the entire history if we wanted to, or more
> recent part of the history but not limited to the "readily available
> storage" part.  IOW, where the boundary between the older and the
> newer parts of the history lies and which commits the commit graph
> covers should be pretty much independent.
> 
> So moving from object_database (i.e. the whole world) to individual
> odb_source (i.e. where one particular subset of the history is
> stored) feels like totally backwards to me.  Surely, a commit graph
> file may be defined over a set of packfiles and remaining loose
> object files, but it is not like an instance of the commit-graph
> file is tied to packfiles in the sense that it uses the index into
> some packfile instead of the actual object names to refer to
> commits, or anything like that (this is quite different from other
> files that are very specific to a single object store, like midx
> that is tied to the packfiles it describes).

This is an interesting aspect to things, where the commit-graph file
is a "structured cache" of certain commit information. It happens to
be located within the object stores (either local or in an alternate)
but is conceptually different in a few ways.

The biggest difference is that you can only open one commit-graph
(or chain of commit-graphs). Having multiple files across different
object stores will not accumulate additional context. Instead, we
have a "first one wins" approach.

This does seem to be something that you are attempting to change
by including the ability to load a commit-graph for each odb (and
closing them in sequence as we close a repo).

So in this sense, the commit-graph lives at the repository level,
not an object store level. When doing I/O to write or read a graph,
we use a specific object store at a time.

The other direction to consider is what context we have when we
interact with a commit-graph. We generally are parsing commits from
a repository or loading Bloom filter data during file history walks.
Each of these do not have a predictable nature of which object store
will "own" the commit we are inspecting, so it wouldn't make sense
to restrict things like odb_parse_commit() over repo_parse_commit().

With these thoughts in mind, I have these big-picture thoughts:

1. Patches 1-5 are great. Nice cleanups.

2. Some of Patch 6 is great, including having the I/O methods use
   an odb_source to help focus the specific location of the files
   being read or written. However, the movement of the struct into
   the odb_source makes less sense and should still exist at the
   object_database level.

Thanks,
-Stolee