From: Junio C Hamano Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:50:31 GMT Subject: Re: git bugs Message-ID: <7viqwfbpzs.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: Linus Torvalds writes: > On Wed, 11 Jun 2008, Ben Lynn wrote: >> >> The only drawback is that I'm not sure how acceptable it is to write to >> the index on a read operation. Is this a big deal? > > Historically, we *never* did it. In fact, it was a big deal. These days we > do it opportunistically for "git diff" if we can, but making sure that it > all still works for a read-only access (think gitweb etc - the reader is Thanks for giving a good summary (I've been away), and I agree with your analysis of the situation. I do not see much need to _fix_ anything around this area, except your "smudging is not zero timestamp" update.