From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Tue, 03 May 2005 19:13:40 GMT
Subject: Re: 'read-tree -m head' vs 'read-tree head'
Message-ID: <7vbr7sw2aj.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <20050503124935.GT25004@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>

The form "git-read-tree <tree>" does not care what the original
cache contained and builds the cache from scratch. On the other
hand, "git-read-tree -m <tree>" uses what the original cache
contained to speed things up in later checkout-cache.  That's
the official version of difference description.

That said, I've been wondering if "git-read-tree -m <tree>"
always does the same thing (but only making the operation
afterwards faster) as "git-read-tree <tree>".  That is, if there
is a valid use case where you would want to use it without "-m"
because "-m" does something wrong.  If there is no such valid
use case probably we should always do "-m" version if we are
reading only one tree, practically deprecating "-m" flag to the
same status as "-r" flag to git-diff-cache.

However, I have not had time to think things through and have
not bugged Linus about it myself.