Re: [PATCH v3] unpack-trees: avoid duplicate ODB lookups during checkout

> git@jeffhostetler.com writes:
> 
> > +	/*
> > +	 * Fetch the tree from the ODB for each peer directory in the
> > +	 * n commits.
> > +	 *
> > +	 * For 2- and 3-way traversals, we try to avoid hitting the
> > +	 * ODB twice for the same OID.  This should yield a nice speed
> > +	 * up in checkouts and merges when the commits are similar.
> > +	 *
> > +	 * We don't bother doing the full O(n^2) search for larger n,
> > +	 * because wider traversals don't happen that often and we
> > +	 * avoid the search setup.
> > +	 *
> > +	 * When 2 peer OIDs are the same, we just copy the tree
> > +	 * descriptor data.  This implicitly borrows the buffer
> > +	 * data from the earlier cell.
> 
> This "borrowing" made me worried, but it turns out that this is
> perfectly OK.
> 
> fill_tree_descriptor() uses read_sha1_file() to give a tree_desc its
> own copy of the tree object data, so the code that calls into the
> tree traversal API is responsible for freeing the buffer returned
> from fill_tree_descriptor().  The updated code avoids double freeing
> by setting buf[i] to NULL for borrowing [i].