On 5/6/25 7:09 AM, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
The `object_directory` structure is used as an access point for a single object directory like ".git/objects". While the structure isn't yet fully self-contained, the intent is for it to eventually contain all information required to access objects in one specific location. While the name "object directory" is a good fit for now, this will change over time as we continue with the agenda to make pluggable object databases a thing. Eventually, objects may not be accessed via any kind of directory at all anymore, but they could instead be backed by any kind of durable storage mechanism. While it seems quite far-fetched for now, it is thinkable that eventually this might even be some form of a database, for example.
I agree that "object directory" is leaking some of the abstraction, and that we'd want to be able to have pluggable ODB backends.
As such, the current name of this structure will become worse over time as we evolve into the direction of pluggable ODBs. Immediate next steps will start to carve out proper self-contained object directories, which requires us to pass in these object directories as parameters. Based on our modern naming schema this means that those functions should then be named after their subsystem, which means that we would start to bake the current name into the codebase more and more. Let's preempt this by renaming the structure to `odb_backend` now already. This name is agnostic of how exactly objects are stored and allows us to easily introduce e.g. a `files_odb_backend` and other specific implementations over time.
But here's where I'll get a little nitpicky and say that these are "odb"s not "odb_backend"s. * odb: a single object database. A repo can have multiple, currently only one that is read/write and multiple read-only alternates. * odb backend: an _implementation_ of an object database. This would be the structure that containts a vtable of implementation methods. Each individual 'odb' would point to a single backend describing how to access the data in it. Does that make sense? If we are going through the effort of renaming things, I think it's worth being a little more future-proof here. Thanks, -Stolee
