refs: switch peel_ref() to peel_iterated_oid()

The peel_ref() interface is confusing and error-prone:

  - it's typically used by ref iteration callbacks that have both a
    refname and oid. But since they pass only the refname, we may load
    the ref value from the filesystem again. This is inefficient, but
    also means we are open to a race if somebody simultaneously updates
    the ref. E.g., this:

      int some_ref_cb(const char *refname, const struct object_id *oid, ...)
      {
              if (!peel_ref(refname, &peeled))
                      printf("%s peels to %s",
                             oid_to_hex(oid), oid_to_hex(&peeled);
      }

    could print nonsense. It is correct to say "refname peels to..."
    (you may see the "before" value or the "after" value, either of
    which is consistent), but mentioning both oids may be mixing
    before/after values.

    Worse, whether this is possible depends on whether the optimization
    to read from the current iterator value kicks in. So it is actually
    not possible with:

      for_each_ref(some_ref_cb);

    but it _is_ possible with:

      head_ref(some_ref_cb);

    which does not use the iterator mechanism (though in practice, HEAD
    should never peel to anything, so this may not be triggerable).

  - it must take a fully-qualified refname for the read_ref_full() code
    path to work. Yet we routinely pass it partial refnames from
    callbacks to for_each_tag_ref(), etc. This happens to work when
    iterating because there we do not call read_ref_full() at all, and
    only use the passed refname to check if it is the same as the
    iterator. But the requirements for the function parameters are quite
    unclear.

Instead of taking a refname, let's instead take an oid. That fixes both
problems. It's a little funny for a "ref" function not to involve refs
at all. The key thing is that it's optimizing under the hood based on
having access to the ref iterator. So let's change the name to make it
clear why you'd want this function versus just peel_object().

There are two other directions I considered but rejected:

  - we could pass the peel information into the each_ref_fn callback.
    However, we don't know if the caller actually wants it or not. For
    packed-refs, providing it is essentially free. But for loose refs,
    we actually have to peel the object, which would be wasteful in most
    cases. We could likewise pass in a flag to the callback indicating
    whether the peeled information is known, but that complicates those
    callbacks, as they then have to decide whether to manually peel
    themselves. Plus it requires changing the interface of every
    callback, whether they care about peeling or not, and there are many
    of them.

  - we could make a function to return the peeled value of the current
    iterated ref (computing it if necessary), and BUG() otherwise. I.e.:

      int peel_current_iterated_ref(struct object_id *out);

    Each of the current callers is an each_ref_fn callback, so they'd
    mostly be happy. But:

      - we use those callbacks with functions like head_ref(), which do
        not use the iteration code. So we'd need to handle the fallback
        case there, anyway.

      - it's possible that a caller would want to call into generic code
        that sometimes is used during iteration and sometimes not. This
        encapsulates the logic to do the fast thing when possible, and
        fallback when necessary.

The implementation is mostly obvious, but I want to call out a few
things in the patch:

  - the test-tool coverage for peel_ref() is now meaningless, as it all
    collapses to a single peel_object() call (arguably they were pretty
    uninteresting before; the tricky part of that function is the
    fast-path we see during iteration, but these calls didn't trigger
    that). I've just dropped it entirely, though note that some other
    tests relied on the tags we created; I've moved that creation to the
    tests where it matters.

  - we no longer need to take a ref_store parameter, since we'd never
    look up a ref now. We do still rely on a global "current iterator"
    variable which _could_ be kept per-ref-store. But in practice this
    is only useful if there are multiple recursive iterations, at which
    point the more appropriate solution is probably a stack of
    iterators. No caller used the actual ref-store parameter anyway
    (they all call the wrapper that passes the_repository).

  - the original only kicked in the optimization when the "refname"
    pointer matched (i.e., not string comparison). We do likewise with
    the "oid" parameter here, but fall back to doing an actual oideq()
    call. This in theory lets us kick in the optimization more often,
    though in practice no current caller cares. It should never be
    wrong, though (peeling is a property of an object, so two refs
    pointing to the same object would peel identically).

  - the original took care not to touch the peeled out-parameter unless
    we found something to put in it. But no caller cares about this, and
    anyway, it is enforced by peel_object() itself (and even in the
    optimized iterator case, that's where we eventually end up). We can
    shorten the code and avoid an extra copy by just passing the
    out-parameter through the stack.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Reviewed-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/builtin/gc.c b/builtin/gc.c
index b315b2ad58..01e8dc9f70 100644
--- a/builtin/gc.c
+++ b/builtin/gc.c
@@ -769,7 +769,7 @@ static int dfs_on_ref(const char *refname,
 	struct commit_list *stack = NULL;
 	struct commit *commit;
 
-	if (!peel_ref(refname, &peeled))
+	if (!peel_iterated_oid(oid, &peeled))
 		oid = &peeled;
 	if (oid_object_info(the_repository, oid, NULL) != OBJ_COMMIT)
 		return 0;