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microsoft / VFSForGit

Virtual File System for Git: Enable Git at Enterprise Scale
MIT License
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Q: What is the idea behind GVFS_UNATTENDED environment variable? #1352

Open turbonaitis opened 5 years ago

turbonaitis commented 5 years ago

I've found that code checks if the GVFS_UNATTENDED environment variable is set to 1, but there doesn't seem to be any use cases for it, nor any documentation.

What is its intended usage?

chrisd8088 commented 5 years ago

I can attest that it's been handy in our Linux work to avoid functional test errors while we don't have a running GVFS.Service process yet.

This is because otherwise the functional test suite spots the WARNING: Failed to register for automount message printed during mounting, but we can (temporarily) disable that on Linux while we lack a GVFS.Service process by setting GVFS_UNATTENDED. So that's at least one usage, albeit possibly not the originally intended one.

turbonaitis commented 5 years ago

One problem I see with unattended mode, is that it uses a different local cache path, than attended. https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit/blob/c8df6874d5676ec146ef0873baa37f3cf27f9976/GVFS/GVFS.Common/LocalCacheResolver.cs#L29-L36

Also, no git maintenance steps are being scheduled in the GVFS.Mount process, if it's Unattended https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit/blob/15dff017754dd41f7f7508331cd2cb237d9dfc53/GVFS/GVFS.Common/Maintenance/GitMaintenanceScheduler.cs#L50-L55

Also, GitStatusCache is disabled for unattended mounts: https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit/blob/8c61c1ad051c97545a2dd2b6b0e22fca9b3b7fa1/GVFS/GVFS.Mount/InProcessMount.cs#L545

It would be great to hear what are the intentions for unattended mode - is it for testing, for CI use cases, or for what? @kewillford, perhaps you can shed some light on this?

50Wliu commented 3 years ago

Bringing this back up: we are using VFS for Git on an unattended build machine to clone and incrementally build source code but it's unclear whether GVFS_UNATTENDED would be appropriate for that use case or not.

derrickstolee commented 3 years ago

I believe that is the point. You use it when you do not expect a user to be at the machine.

Be aware: the variable does things like disables background maintenance.