Re: Features from GitSurvey 2010

From: Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 1, 2011, 15:52 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTinJVa++tttPDav1g1+w128fWsouM=+gf14eUOOK@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201102011451.17456.jnareb@gmail.com>

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On Sun, 30 Jan 2011, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> > support for tracking empty directories
>>
>> Tricky to get the UI right.  I am interested in and would be glad to
>> help with this one.
>
> Also one needs to remember that this would require adding extension
> to git index, because currently it tracks only files, and not
> directories.  Explicitly tracking directories in the index could be
> useful for other purposes...
>
> The major difficulty of this is IMHO not the UI, but tracking all those
> tricky corner cases (like directory/file conflict, etc.).

Sort order in index is quite special/strange and must be handled correctly when dirs and files are mixed. There are already special directories in index: the submodules. Current git code treats S_ISDIR() and S_ISGITLINK() the same in ce_to_dtype() and some more places. You need to decouple it somehow.

I tried this (for another purpose) and pulled back. I recall Shawn had a tree-based index implementation, don't know if he still has it. Could be a good point to start adding dirs to index.

Actually tree-based index with dictionary (something like trees in packv4) is a good feature itself. It could shrink index size down a lot. index is frequently read/written so small index helps (webkit's index is 16M, 4M after gzipped).

-- 
Duy