Re: git bugs

From: Ben Lynn <benlynn@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 11, 2008, 20:57 UTC
Message-ID: <832adb090806111357y749a4e03qbddd37b0c077b1c4@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0806111151260.3101@woody.linux-foundation.org>

> So I really prefer not to. But you can take it up with Junio if you think
> it can be a big deal.

I began writing a patch but I abandoned it. I don't have much experience with the code base and I'd almost certainly miss a bunch of corner cases. Your patch seems to be the easiest way to go. I'm not motivated to push pre-emptive smudging, even if it might be more efficient. After all, how often does this race condition come up?

But I have a per-file flagged version of the index for personal use, and it's good to know that it's a valid strategy.

> 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
> *not* necessarily the owner of the archive at all!)

I hadn't thought about this case. This is intriguing: why does gitweb need access to the index? I thought the index was only to make operations fast for users intending to make changes to the repo. Why can't servers run stripped-down versions of git that don't bother with an index?

-Ben