Re: 'git add' corrupts repository if the working directory is modified as it runs

From: Ilari Liusvaara <ilari.liusvaara@elisanet.fi>
Date: Feb 13, 2010, 13:39 UTC
Message-ID: <20100213133951.GA14352@Knoppix>
In-Reply-To: <20100213121238.GA2559@progeny.tock>

On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 06:12:38AM -0600, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> 
> This leaves me nervous about speed.  Consider the following simple
> case: someone the file to be added is already in the object
> repository somewhere (maybe the user has tried this code before, or
> a file was renamed with 'mv', or a patch applied with 'patch', or an
> unmount and remount dirtied the stat information).
> 
> With the current code, write_sha1_file() will hash the file, notice
> that object is already in .git/objects, and return.  With a
> read-hash-copy loop, git would have to store a (compressed or
> uncompressed) copy of the file somewhere in the meantime.

It could be done by first reading the file and computing hash, if the hash matches existing object, return that hash. Otherwise read the file for object write, hashing it again and use that value for object ID.

This would require two hash computations in non-existing case, but SHA-1 is pretty fast. If the first computation produces match, then it doesn't matter if file is modified as adding and modifying in parallel results undefined contents anyway (just that it should not corrupt the repository).

-Ilari