Re: [PATCH] diff: add support for reading files literally with --no-index

> On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 6:18 PM Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> > > I wonder if --follow-symlinks would be a good alternative for this
> > > (then if the final destination is unmmapable then we just read the
> > > file whole in memory without the user asking, so it will work with
> > > pipes). --follow-symlinks then could be made work with non-"no-index"
> > > case too. But --literally is also ok.
> >
> > It's more than symlinks, though. Reading from a named pipe, we'd want to
> > see the actual contents with --literally (and not "oops, I don't know
> > how to represent a named pipe").
> 
> Yes, but I think at least --no-index it makes sense to just fall back
> to read() if we can't mmap(). mmap is more of an optimization than a
> requirement. There's no loss going from "oops I don't know how to
> represent it" to "here's the content from whatever what that device
> is". Symlinks are different because we have two possible
> representations and the user should choose.