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-rw-r--r--Documentation/technical/api-error-handling.txt10
-rw-r--r--Documentation/technical/api-simple-ipc.txt105
-rw-r--r--Documentation/technical/api-trace2.txt2
-rw-r--r--Documentation/technical/multi-pack-index.txt5
-rw-r--r--Documentation/technical/pack-format.txt83
-rw-r--r--Documentation/technical/reftable.txt9
6 files changed, 207 insertions, 7 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/technical/api-error-handling.txt b/Documentation/technical/api-error-handling.txt
index ceeedd485c..8be4f4d0d6 100644
--- a/Documentation/technical/api-error-handling.txt
+++ b/Documentation/technical/api-error-handling.txt
@@ -1,8 +1,11 @@
Error reporting in git
======================
-`die`, `usage`, `error`, and `warning` report errors of various
-kinds.
+`BUG`, `die`, `usage`, `error`, and `warning` report errors of
+various kinds.
+
+- `BUG` is for failed internal assertions that should never happen,
+ i.e. a bug in git itself.
- `die` is for fatal application errors. It prints a message to
the user and exits with status 128.
@@ -20,6 +23,9 @@ kinds.
without running into too many problems. Like `error`, it
returns -1 after reporting the situation to the caller.
+These reports will be logged via the trace2 facility. See the "error"
+event in link:api-trace2.txt[trace2 API].
+
Customizable error handlers
---------------------------
diff --git a/Documentation/technical/api-simple-ipc.txt b/Documentation/technical/api-simple-ipc.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..d79ad323e6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/technical/api-simple-ipc.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,105 @@
+Simple-IPC API
+==============
+
+The Simple-IPC API is a collection of `ipc_` prefixed library routines
+and a basic communication protocol that allow an IPC-client process to
+send an application-specific IPC-request message to an IPC-server
+process and receive an application-specific IPC-response message.
+
+Communication occurs over a named pipe on Windows and a Unix domain
+socket on other platforms. IPC-clients and IPC-servers rendezvous at
+a previously agreed-to application-specific pathname (which is outside
+the scope of this design) that is local to the computer system.
+
+The IPC-server routines within the server application process create a
+thread pool to listen for connections and receive request messages
+from multiple concurrent IPC-clients. When received, these messages
+are dispatched up to the server application callbacks for handling.
+IPC-server routines then incrementally relay responses back to the
+IPC-client.
+
+The IPC-client routines within a client application process connect
+to the IPC-server and send a request message and wait for a response.
+When received, the response is returned back the caller.
+
+For example, the `fsmonitor--daemon` feature will be built as a server
+application on top of the IPC-server library routines. It will have
+threads watching for file system events and a thread pool waiting for
+client connections. Clients, such as `git status` will request a list
+of file system events since a point in time and the server will
+respond with a list of changed files and directories. The formats of
+the request and response are application-specific; the IPC-client and
+IPC-server routines treat them as opaque byte streams.
+
+
+Comparison with sub-process model
+---------------------------------
+
+The Simple-IPC mechanism differs from the existing `sub-process.c`
+model (Documentation/technical/long-running-process-protocol.txt) and
+used by applications like Git-LFS. In the LFS-style sub-process model
+the helper is started by the foreground process, communication happens
+via a pair of file descriptors bound to the stdin/stdout of the
+sub-process, the sub-process only serves the current foreground
+process, and the sub-process exits when the foreground process
+terminates.
+
+In the Simple-IPC model the server is a very long-running service. It
+can service many clients at the same time and has a private socket or
+named pipe connection to each active client. It might be started
+(on-demand) by the current client process or it might have been
+started by a previous client or by the OS at boot time. The server
+process is not associated with a terminal and it persists after
+clients terminate. Clients do not have access to the stdin/stdout of
+the server process and therefore must communicate over sockets or
+named pipes.
+
+
+Server startup and shutdown
+---------------------------
+
+How an application server based upon IPC-server is started is also
+outside the scope of the Simple-IPC design and is a property of the
+application using it. For example, the server might be started or
+restarted during routine maintenance operations, or it might be
+started as a system service during the system boot-up sequence, or it
+might be started on-demand by a foreground Git command when needed.
+
+Similarly, server shutdown is a property of the application using
+the simple-ipc routines. For example, the server might decide to
+shutdown when idle or only upon explicit request.
+
+
+Simple-IPC protocol
+-------------------
+
+The Simple-IPC protocol consists of a single request message from the
+client and an optional response message from the server. Both the
+client and server messages are unlimited in length and are terminated
+with a flush packet.
+
+The pkt-line routines (Documentation/technical/protocol-common.txt)
+are used to simplify buffer management during message generation,
+transmission, and reception. A flush packet is used to mark the end
+of the message. This allows the sender to incrementally generate and
+transmit the message. It allows the receiver to incrementally receive
+the message in chunks and to know when they have received the entire
+message.
+
+The actual byte format of the client request and server response
+messages are application specific. The IPC layer transmits and
+receives them as opaque byte buffers without any concern for the
+content within. It is the job of the calling application layer to
+understand the contents of the request and response messages.
+
+
+Summary
+-------
+
+Conceptually, the Simple-IPC protocol is similar to an HTTP REST
+request. Clients connect, make an application-specific and
+stateless request, receive an application-specific
+response, and disconnect. It is a one round trip facility for
+querying the server. The Simple-IPC routines hide the socket,
+named pipe, and thread pool details and allow the application
+layer to focus on the application at hand.
diff --git a/Documentation/technical/api-trace2.txt b/Documentation/technical/api-trace2.txt
index c65ffafc48..3f52f981a2 100644
--- a/Documentation/technical/api-trace2.txt
+++ b/Documentation/technical/api-trace2.txt
@@ -465,7 +465,7 @@ completed.)
------------
`"error"`::
- This event is emitted when one of the `error()`, `die()`,
+ This event is emitted when one of the `BUG()`, `error()`, `die()`,
`warning()`, or `usage()` functions are called.
+
------------
diff --git a/Documentation/technical/multi-pack-index.txt b/Documentation/technical/multi-pack-index.txt
index e8e377a59f..fb688976c4 100644
--- a/Documentation/technical/multi-pack-index.txt
+++ b/Documentation/technical/multi-pack-index.txt
@@ -43,8 +43,9 @@ Design Details
a change in format.
- The MIDX keeps only one record per object ID. If an object appears
- in multiple packfiles, then the MIDX selects the copy in the most-
- recently modified packfile.
+ in multiple packfiles, then the MIDX selects the copy in the
+ preferred packfile, otherwise selecting from the most-recently
+ modified packfile.
- If there exist packfiles in the pack directory not registered in
the MIDX, then those packfiles are loaded into the `packed_git`
diff --git a/Documentation/technical/pack-format.txt b/Documentation/technical/pack-format.txt
index 1faa949bf6..8d2f42f29e 100644
--- a/Documentation/technical/pack-format.txt
+++ b/Documentation/technical/pack-format.txt
@@ -379,3 +379,86 @@ CHUNK DATA:
TRAILER:
Index checksum of the above contents.
+
+== multi-pack-index reverse indexes
+
+Similar to the pack-based reverse index, the multi-pack index can also
+be used to generate a reverse index.
+
+Instead of mapping between offset, pack-, and index position, this
+reverse index maps between an object's position within the MIDX, and
+that object's position within a pseudo-pack that the MIDX describes
+(i.e., the ith entry of the multi-pack reverse index holds the MIDX
+position of ith object in pseudo-pack order).
+
+To clarify the difference between these orderings, consider a multi-pack
+reachability bitmap (which does not yet exist, but is what we are
+building towards here). Each bit needs to correspond to an object in the
+MIDX, and so we need an efficient mapping from bit position to MIDX
+position.
+
+One solution is to let bits occupy the same position in the oid-sorted
+index stored by the MIDX. But because oids are effectively random, their
+resulting reachability bitmaps would have no locality, and thus compress
+poorly. (This is the reason that single-pack bitmaps use the pack
+ordering, and not the .idx ordering, for the same purpose.)
+
+So we'd like to define an ordering for the whole MIDX based around
+pack ordering, which has far better locality (and thus compresses more
+efficiently). We can think of a pseudo-pack created by the concatenation
+of all of the packs in the MIDX. E.g., if we had a MIDX with three packs
+(a, b, c), with 10, 15, and 20 objects respectively, we can imagine an
+ordering of the objects like:
+
+ |a,0|a,1|...|a,9|b,0|b,1|...|b,14|c,0|c,1|...|c,19|
+
+where the ordering of the packs is defined by the MIDX's pack list,
+and then the ordering of objects within each pack is the same as the
+order in the actual packfile.
+
+Given the list of packs and their counts of objects, you can
+naïvely reconstruct that pseudo-pack ordering (e.g., the object at
+position 27 must be (c,1) because packs "a" and "b" consumed 25 of the
+slots). But there's a catch. Objects may be duplicated between packs, in
+which case the MIDX only stores one pointer to the object (and thus we'd
+want only one slot in the bitmap).
+
+Callers could handle duplicates themselves by reading objects in order
+of their bit-position, but that's linear in the number of objects, and
+much too expensive for ordinary bitmap lookups. Building a reverse index
+solves this, since it is the logical inverse of the index, and that
+index has already removed duplicates. But, building a reverse index on
+the fly can be expensive. Since we already have an on-disk format for
+pack-based reverse indexes, let's reuse it for the MIDX's pseudo-pack,
+too.
+
+Objects from the MIDX are ordered as follows to string together the
+pseudo-pack. Let `pack(o)` return the pack from which `o` was selected
+by the MIDX, and define an ordering of packs based on their numeric ID
+(as stored by the MIDX). Let `offset(o)` return the object offset of `o`
+within `pack(o)`. Then, compare `o1` and `o2` as follows:
+
+ - If one of `pack(o1)` and `pack(o2)` is preferred and the other
+ is not, then the preferred one sorts first.
++
+(This is a detail that allows the MIDX bitmap to determine which
+pack should be used by the pack-reuse mechanism, since it can ask
+the MIDX for the pack containing the object at bit position 0).
+
+ - If `pack(o1) ≠ pack(o2)`, then sort the two objects in descending
+ order based on the pack ID.
+
+ - Otherwise, `pack(o1) = pack(o2)`, and the objects are sorted in
+ pack-order (i.e., `o1` sorts ahead of `o2` exactly when `offset(o1)
+ < offset(o2)`).
+
+In short, a MIDX's pseudo-pack is the de-duplicated concatenation of
+objects in packs stored by the MIDX, laid out in pack order, and the
+packs arranged in MIDX order (with the preferred pack coming first).
+
+Finally, note that the MIDX's reverse index is not stored as a chunk in
+the multi-pack-index itself. This is done because the reverse index
+includes the checksum of the pack or MIDX to which it belongs, which
+makes it impossible to write in the MIDX. To avoid races when rewriting
+the MIDX, a MIDX reverse index includes the MIDX's checksum in its
+filename (e.g., `multi-pack-index-xyz.rev`).
diff --git a/Documentation/technical/reftable.txt b/Documentation/technical/reftable.txt
index 3ef169af27..d7c3b645cf 100644
--- a/Documentation/technical/reftable.txt
+++ b/Documentation/technical/reftable.txt
@@ -1011,8 +1011,13 @@ reftable stack, reload `tables.list`, and delete any tables no longer mentioned
in `tables.list`.
Irregular program exit may still leave about unused files. In this case, a
-cleanup operation can read `tables.list`, note its modification timestamp, and
-delete any unreferenced `*.ref` files that are older.
+cleanup operation should proceed as follows:
+
+* take a lock `tables.list.lock` to prevent concurrent modifications
+* refresh the reftable stack, by reading `tables.list`
+* for each `*.ref` file, remove it if
+** it is not mentioned in `tables.list`, and
+** its max update_index is not beyond the max update_index of the stack
Alternatives considered