Re: [PATCH] git-svn: allow disabling expensive broken symlink checks

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 2, 2009, 03:03 UTC
Message-ID: <7vbptlo7zg.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090201021844.GB18855@dcvr.yhbt.net>

Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Since dbc6c74d0858d77e61e092a48d467e725211f8e9, git-svn has had
> an expensive check for broken symlinks that exist in some
> repositories.  This leads to a heavy performance hit on
> repositories with many empty blobs that are not supposed to be
> symlinks.
>
> The workaround is enabled by default; and may be disabled via:
>
>   git config svn.brokenSymlinkWorkaround false
>
> Reported by Markus Heidelberg.
>
> Signed-off-by: Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net>

How common is this breakage in people's subversion repositories that dbc6c74d (git-svn: handle empty files marked as symlinks in SVN, 2009-01-11) works around?

What's the way to recover from a broken import, when the subversion repository does have such a breakage, and the user used git-svn that predates dbc6c74? Is it very involved, and it is much better to have the safety by default than to force everybody else who interacts with non-broken subversion repository suffer from this performance penalty?

Because the fix (that is broken from the performance angle) is relatively recent, I am wondering if it makes more sense to turn it off by default, and allow people with such a broken history to optionally turn it on.