upload-pack: provide a hook for running pack-objects

When upload-pack serves a client request, it turns to
pack-objects to do the heavy lifting of creating a
packfile. There's no easy way to intercept the call to
pack-objects, but there are a few good reasons to want to do
so:

  1. If you're debugging a client or server issue with
     fetching, you may want to store a copy of the generated
     packfile.

  2. If you're gathering data from real-world fetches for
     performance analysis or debugging, storing a copy of
     the arguments and stdin lets you replay the pack
     generation at your leisure.

  3. You may want to insert a caching layer around
     pack-objects; it is the most CPU- and memory-intensive
     part of serving a fetch, and its output is a pure
     function[1] of its input, making it an ideal place to
     consolidate identical requests.

This patch adds a simple "hook" interface to intercept calls
to pack-objects. The new test demonstrates how it can be
used for debugging (using it for caching is a
straightforward extension; the tricky part is writing the
actual caching layer).

This hook is unlike the normal hook scripts found in the
"hooks/" directory of a repository. Because we promise that
upload-pack is safe to run in an untrusted repository, we
cannot execute arbitrary code or commands found in the
repository (neither in hooks/, nor in the config). So
instead, this hook is triggered from a config variable that
is explicitly ignored in the per-repo config.

The config variable holds the actual shell command to run as
the hook.  Another approach would be to simply treat it as a
boolean: "should I respect the upload-pack hooks in this
repo?", and then run the script from "hooks/" as we usually
do. However, that isn't as flexible; there's no way to run a
hook approved by the site administrator (e.g., in
"/etc/gitconfig") on a repository whose contents are not
trusted. The approach taken by this patch is more
fine-grained, if a little less conventional for git hooks
(it does behave similar to other configured commands like
diff.external, etc).

[1] Pack-objects isn't _actually_ a pure function. Its
    output depends on the exact packing of the object
    database, and if multi-threading is used for delta
    compression, can even differ racily. But for the
    purposes of caching, that's OK; of the many possible
    outputs for a given input, it is sufficient only that we
    output one of them.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index 53f00dbc26..a7abcbeff3 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -2880,6 +2880,21 @@ uploadpack.keepAlive::
 	`uploadpack.keepAlive` seconds. Setting this option to 0
 	disables keepalive packets entirely. The default is 5 seconds.
 
+uploadpack.packObjectsHook::
+	If this option is set, when `upload-pack` would run
+	`git pack-objects` to create a packfile for a client, it will
+	run this shell command instead.  The `pack-objects` command and
+	arguments it _would_ have run (including the `git pack-objects`
+	at the beginning) are appended to the shell command. The stdin
+	and stdout of the hook are treated as if `pack-objects` itself
+	was run. I.e., `upload-pack` will feed input intended for
+	`pack-objects` to the hook, and expects a completed packfile on
+	stdout.
++
+Note that this configuration variable is ignored if it is seen in the
+repository-level config (this is a safety measure against fetching from
+untrusted repositories).
+
 url.<base>.insteadOf::
 	Any URL that starts with this value will be rewritten to
 	start, instead, with <base>. In cases where some site serves a