From 70664d2865ccd21da4a182fed6d11da5a615cd2b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 16 May 2025 18:11:52 +0000
Subject: pack-objects: add --path-walk option

In order to more easily compute delta bases among objects that appear at
the exact same path, add a --path-walk option to 'git pack-objects'.

This option will use the path-walk API instead of the object walk given
by the revision machinery. Since objects will be provided in batches
representing a common path, those objects can be tested for delta bases
immediately instead of waiting for a sort of the full object list by
name-hash. This has multiple benefits, including avoiding collisions by
name-hash.

The objects marked as UNINTERESTING are included in these batches, so we
are guaranteeing some locality to find good delta bases.

After the individual passes are done on a per-path basis, the default
name-hash is used to find other opportunistic delta bases that did not
match exactly by the full path name.

The current implementation performs delta calculations while walking
objects, which is not ideal for a few reasons. First, this will cause
the "Enumerating objects" phase to be much longer than usual. Second, it
does not take advantage of threading during the path-scoped delta
calculations. Even with this lack of threading, the path-walk option is
sometimes faster than the usual approach. Future changes will refactor
this code to allow for threading, but that complexity is deferred until
later to keep this patch as simple as possible.

This new walk is incompatible with some features and is ignored by
others:

 * Object filters are not currently integrated with the path-walk API,
   such as sparse-checkout or tree depth. A blobless packfile could be
   integrated easily, but that is deferred for later.

 * Server-focused features such as delta islands, shallow packs, and
   using a bitmap index are incompatible with the path-walk API.

 * The path walk API is only compatible with the --revs option, not
   taking object lists or pack lists over stdin. These alternative ways
   to specify the objects currently ignores the --path-walk option
   without even a warning.

Future changes will create performance tests that demonstrate the power
of this approach.

Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
---
 Documentation/git-pack-objects.adoc | 13 ++++++++++++-
 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

(limited to 'Documentation/git-pack-objects.adoc')

diff --git a/Documentation/git-pack-objects.adoc b/Documentation/git-pack-objects.adoc
index 7f69ae4855..3b803d3a78 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-pack-objects.adoc
+++ b/Documentation/git-pack-objects.adoc
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ SYNOPSIS
 	[--cruft] [--cruft-expiration=<time>]
 	[--stdout [--filter=<filter-spec>] | <base-name>]
 	[--shallow] [--keep-true-parents] [--[no-]sparse]
-	[--name-hash-version=<n>] < <object-list>
+	[--name-hash-version=<n>] [--path-walk] < <object-list>
 
 
 DESCRIPTION
@@ -375,6 +375,17 @@ many different directories. At the moment, this version is not allowed
 when writing reachability bitmap files with `--write-bitmap-index` and it
 will be automatically changed to version `1`.
 
+--path-walk::
+	Perform compression by first organizing objects by path, then a
+	second pass that compresses across paths as normal. This has the
+	potential to improve delta compression especially in the presence
+	of filenames that cause collisions in Git's default name-hash
+	algorithm.
++
+Incompatible with `--delta-islands`, `--shallow`, or `--filter`. The
+`--use-bitmap-index` option will be ignored in the presence of
+`--path-walk.`
+
 
 DELTA ISLANDS
 -------------
-- 
cgit v1.3

