[PATCH 8/9] read_packed_refs: avoid double-checking sane refs

Prior to d0f810f (refs.c: allow listing and deleting badly named refs, 2014-09-03), read_packed_refs would barf on any malformed refnames by virtue of calling create_ref_entry with the "check" parameter set to 1. That commit loosened our reading so that we call check_refname_format ourselves and just set a REF_BAD_NAME flag.

We then call create_ref_entry with the check parameter set to 0. That function learned to do an extra safety check even when the check parameter is 0, so that we don't load any dangerous refnames (like "../../../etc/passwd"). This is implemented by calling refname_is_safe() in create_ref_entry().

However, we can observe that refname_is_safe() can only be true if check_refname_format() also failed. So in the common case of a sanely named ref, we perform _both_ checks, even though we know that the latter will never trigger. This has a noticeable performance impact when the packed-refs file is large.

Let's drop the refname_is_safe check from create_ref_entry(), and make it the responsibility of the caller. Of the three callers that pass a check parameter of "0", two will have just called check_refname_format(), and can check the refname-safety only when it fails. The third case, pack_if_possible_fn, is copying from an existing ref entry, which must have previously passed our safety check.

With this patch, running "git rev-parse refs/heads/does-not-exist" on a repo with a large (1.6GB) packed-refs file went from:

  real    0m6.768s
  user    0m6.340s
  sys     0m0.432s

to:

  real    0m5.703s
  user    0m5.276s
  sys     0m0.432s

for a wall-clock speedup of 15%.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
---
 refs.c | 6 ++++--
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)