As much as I hate the idea that we might need this for the local system case, this may actually make a lot of sense for the DHT implementation. Right now the DHT code caches the refs on the first access, and then never looks at the backing database again. Its expected that the caller would close and re-open the Repository object before needing a refreshed set of references. This works OK in a server environment, where the Repository is only needed for a short time period for the current request. But is less than ideal for an IDE or GUI application.

So as much as I dislike needing this, I'm actually pretty inclined to +2 the introduction of this method to the API.