Re: git diff infinite loop at attempt to diff two specific commits

From: Matt Pearson <404emailnotfound@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 5, 2009, 18:22 UTC
Message-ID: <706b4240907051122s784e97abkde5628189956ceb0@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20090705181208.GA8629@atjola.homenet>

2009/7/5 Björn Steinbrink <B.Steinbrink@gmx.de>:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On 2009.07.05 19:37:44 +0200, Alexander Toresson wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I've got problems with git diff, it hangs in an infinite loop when
>> attempting to generate a diff between two specific commits. Commands
>> to reproduce:
>>
>> git clone git://eulex.zapto.org/nightfall.git
>> cd nightfall
>> git diff --stat 597711..61a139
>>
>> (Note that the clone needs to fetch 16mb)
>>
>> I'm running git 1.6.3.3.
>
> FWIW, it "hangs" on the save.xml file. The old version is 1.2M, the new
> one is 9M. Using the patience diff algorithm to compare them takes about
> 5 seconds here, while the default algorithm took 6m15s.

I can confirm this for the 1.6.0.4 shipped with Ubuntu Jaunty (so this would seem to not be a recent change). Actually, it may be worse: mine is still running after 8 minutes, and this machine is almost brand-new. Normal diff -u on the two versions of the file finishes in under a second.

On an unrelated note, it's usually a bad idea to have files like configure and *.suo in the repo (and possibly this save.xml as well).