Jeff King authored Aug 11, 2016 and Junio C Hamano committed Aug 11, 2016

We do not allow cycles in the delta graph of a pack (i.e., A
is a delta of B which is a delta of A) for the obvious
reason that you cannot actually access any of the objects in
such a case.

There's a last-ditch attempt to notice cycles during the
write phase, during which we issue a warning to the user and
write one of the objects out in full. However, this is
"last-ditch" for two reasons:

  1. By this time, it's too late to find another delta for
     the object, so the resulting pack is larger than it
     otherwise could be.

  2. The warning is there because this is something that
     _shouldn't_ ever happen. If it does, then either:

       a. a pack we are reusing deltas from had its own
          cycle

       b. we are reusing deltas from multiple packs, and
          we found a cycle among them (i.e., A is a delta of
          B in one pack, but B is a delta of A in another,
          and we choose to use both deltas).

       c. there is a bug in the delta-search code

     So this code serves as a final check that none of these
     things has happened, warns the user, and prevents us
     from writing a bogus pack.

Right now, (2b) should never happen because of the static
ordering of packs in want_object_in_pack(). If two objects
have a delta relationship, then they must be in the same
pack, and therefore we will find them from that same pack.

However, a future patch would like to change that static
ordering, which will make (2b) a common occurrence. In
preparation, we should be able to handle those kinds of
cycles better. This patch does by introducing a
cycle-breaking step during the get_object_details() phase,
when we are deciding which deltas can be reused. That gives
us the chance to feed the objects into the delta search as
if the cycle did not exist.

We'll leave the detection and warning in the write_object()
phase in place, as it still serves as a check for case (2c).

This does mean we will stop warning for (2a). That case is
caused by bogus input packs, and we ideally would warn the
user about it.  However, since those cycles show up after
picking reusable deltas, they look the same as (2b) to us;
our new code will break the cycles early and the last-ditch
check will never see them.

We could do analysis on any cycles that we find to
distinguish the two cases (i.e., it is a bogus pack if and
only if every delta in the cycle is in the same pack), but
we don't need to. If there is a cycle inside a pack, we'll
run into problems not only reusing the delta, but accessing
the object data at all. So when we try to dig up the actual
size of the object, we'll hit that same cycle and kick in
our usual complain-and-try-another-source code.

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