It's a background server that you launch with `git maintenance start`.
> This cross-platform feature allows Git to keep your repository healthy while not blocking any of your interactions. In particular, this will improve your git fetch times by pre-fetching the latest objects from your remotes once an hour.
Instead, the remote refs are stored in
refs/prefetch/<remote>/. Also, tags are not updated.
This is done to avoid disrupting the remote-tracking branches. The end users expect these refs to stay unmoved unless they initiate a fetch. With prefetch
task, however, the objects necessary to complete a later real fetch would already be obtained, so the real fetch would go faster. In the ideal case, it
will just become an update to a bunch of remote-tracking branches without any object transfer.
The commits referenced in the blog post look to be from the Scalar team lead as well. Looks like some of their work is getting upstreamed which is exciting. [2]
Although, I wonder what this means for the Scalar project itself.
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/introducing-scalar/
[2] e.g., https://github.com/git/git/compare/26bb5437f6defed72996b6a2b...
Putting background maintenance into Git was actually part of our effort to get Scalar on Linux.
You might be interested in our "Philosophy of Scalar" [1] document, which includes this paragraph:
> Scalar intends to do very little more than the standard Git client. We actively implement new features into Git instead of Scalar, then update Scalar only to configure those new settings. In particular, we are porting features like background maintenance to Git to make Scalar simpler and make Git more powerful.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/scalar/blob/main/docs/philosoph...
Implemented via crontab on linux, launchctl on MacOS, and schtasks on Windows.
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-maintenance#_background_mainten...