From: Jeff King Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:32:08 GMT Subject: Re: Plugin mechanism(s) for Git? Message-ID: <20160715133208.GA22711@sigill.intra.peff.net> In-Reply-To: On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 02:46:28PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 2:18 PM, Jeff King wrote: > > Some features, like the index-helper, aren't quite so easy. One reason > > is that its data needs to persist as a cache between multiple git > > invocations. In general, I think it would be nice to solve that by > > communicating via on-disk files, rather than a running daemon (just > > because it has fewer moving parts). But that's only half of it for > > index-helper. It needs to monitor inotify while git isn't running at > > all; so it really _does_ need some kind of long-running daemon. > > This *may* have changed in the recent versions of the series, but I'm > fairly sure and for what it's worth to this discussion, that's not > what the index-helper does. It's there to keep the index file in > memory instead of reading it from disk. > > It can *also* if you "git update-index --watchman" spawn a watchman > daemon in the background, which is the thing that'll be doing the > inotify calls and needs to stay persistent, the index-helper then > communicates with the watchman daemon "what changed since X?" to > compute a new index when requested. Ah, yeah, you're right. Sorry for the confusion; I haven't actually followed the topic all that closely. -Peff