maintenance: add prefetch task

When working with very large repositories, an incremental 'git fetch'
command can download a large amount of data. If there are many other
users pushing to a common repo, then this data can rival the initial
pack-file size of a 'git clone' of a medium-size repo.

Users may want to keep the data on their local repos as close as
possible to the data on the remote repos by fetching periodically in
the background. This can break up a large daily fetch into several
smaller hourly fetches.

The task is called "prefetch" because it is work done in advance
of a foreground fetch to make that 'git fetch' command much faster.

However, if we simply ran 'git fetch <remote>' in the background,
then the user running a foreground 'git fetch <remote>' would lose
some important feedback when a new branch appears or an existing
branch updates. This is especially true if a remote branch is
force-updated and this isn't noticed by the user because it occurred
in the background. Further, the functionality of 'git push
--force-with-lease' becomes suspect.

When running 'git fetch <remote> <options>' in the background, use
the following options for careful updating:

1. --no-tags prevents getting a new tag when a user wants to see
   the new tags appear in their foreground fetches.

2. --refmap= removes the configured refspec which usually updates
   refs/remotes/<remote>/* with the refs advertised by the remote.
   While this looks confusing, this was documented and tested by
   b40a50264ac (fetch: document and test --refmap="", 2020-01-21),
   including this sentence in the documentation:

	Providing an empty `<refspec>` to the `--refmap` option
	causes Git to ignore the configured refspecs and rely
	entirely on the refspecs supplied as command-line arguments.

3. By adding a new refspec "+refs/heads/*:refs/prefetch/<remote>/*"
   we can ensure that we actually load the new values somewhere in
   our refspace while not updating refs/heads or refs/remotes. By
   storing these refs here, the commit-graph job will update the
   commit-graph with the commits from these hidden refs.

4. --prune will delete the refs/prefetch/<remote> refs that no
   longer appear on the remote.

5. --no-write-fetch-head prevents updating FETCH_HEAD.

We've been using this step as a critical background job in Scalar
[1] (and VFS for Git). This solved a pain point that was showing up
in user reports: fetching was a pain! Users do not like waiting to
download the data that was created while they were away from their
machines. After implementing background fetch, the foreground fetch
commands sped up significantly because they mostly just update refs
and download a small amount of new data. The effect is especially
dramatic when paried with --no-show-forced-udpates (through
fetch.showForcedUpdates=false).

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/scalar/blob/master/Scalar.Common/Maintenance/FetchStep.cs

Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/git-maintenance.txt b/Documentation/git-maintenance.txt
index 6abcb8255a..12668fccf7 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-maintenance.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-maintenance.txt
@@ -47,6 +47,21 @@ commit-graph::
 	`commit-graph-chain` file. They will be deleted by a later run based
 	on the expiration delay.
 
+prefetch::
+	The `prefetch` task updates the object directory with the latest
+	objects from all registered remotes. For each remote, a `git fetch`
+	command is run. The refmap is custom to avoid updating local or remote
+	branches (those in `refs/heads` or `refs/remotes`). Instead, the
+	remote refs are stored in `refs/prefetch/<remote>/`. Also, tags are
+	not updated.
++
+This is done to avoid disrupting the remote-tracking branches. The end users
+expect these refs to stay unmoved unless they initiate a fetch.  With prefetch
+task, however, the objects necessary to complete a later real fetch would
+already be obtained, so the real fetch would go faster.  In the ideal case,
+it will just become an update to bunch of remote-tracking branches without
+any object transfer.
+
 gc::
 	Clean up unnecessary files and optimize the local repository. "GC"
 	stands for "garbage collection," but this task performs many