Re: Git commit generation numbers

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jul 14, 2011, 19:51 UTC
Message-ID: <CA+55aFzuQnfo1iywnp-WAajMHe2+6_HOM85aw0bS+p0xv5RyhA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20110714194638.GE8453@thunk.org>

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Ted Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

>
> Would it be considered evil if we put the generation number in the
> pack, but not consider it part of the formal object (i.e., it would be
> just a cache, but one that wouldn't change once the pack was created)?

That would actually be a major change to data structures, and would require some serious surgery and be hard to support in a backwards-compatible way (think different git versions accessing the same repository).

Much bigger patch than the one I did.

So it sounds like it would work - and it would probably be a simple matter of just incrementing the pack version number if you just say "cannot access the pack with old versions" - but I think it's a really fragile approach.

                  Linus