Re: Unusual behavior from git describe

From: Allan Caffee <allan.caffee@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 30, 2011, 16:23 UTC
Message-ID: <CA+jCPNfsQ2oqDzTpJL4ck0vNBJnfXwb+aaSrzStrs55kq+CTHA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAGdFq_imU3_=E1LK-AG33Tj70iOJBTmt2_qdUKVHL9DVW2yJRQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 9:32 AM, Sverre Rabbelier <srabbelier@gmail.com> wrote:

> Does it perhaps touch some of the tracked files? That way it would
> make sense git at first thinks it's dirty (since the lstat info
> changed), but then 'git status' will actually check the contents of
> the file and notice that they're equal? Just guessing here though.

Sounds like you're on the right track. git diff-index reveals that the index is stale

========>8==============>8========= :100644 100644 781975ec321be574e0b016c9e699804430a4cefc 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 M MANIFEST.in :100644 100644 bddeac47f9d67e8496a7e1d76f3e024e644ee332 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 M fabfile.py ... :100644 100644 4f09e2dbb7b0b7aeb0063468bd1931e5c969d2d6 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 M flaskapi/__init__.py :100644 100644 e4cc0de216a9c5a68ca87650bbe0be24f327df27 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 M version.py ===============>8==============>8==

It looks like this was caused by setuptools hardlinking files into a temp directory and then deleting the links, as demonstrated by:

% git diff-index HEAD -- % ln MANIFEST.in file && rm file % git diff-index HEAD -- :100644 100644 781975ec321be574e0b016c9e699804430a4cefc 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 M MANIFEST.in

I've tried adding a call to refresh_index() in describe.c but it doesn't seem to have any effect on the results. (Patch below.) Any idea what the proper fix is for this?

-- Allan

diff --git a/builtin/describe.c b/builtin/describe.c
index 66fc291..73e98ed 100644
--- a/builtin/describe.c
+++ b/builtin/describe.c
@@ -462,8 +462,11 @@ int cmd_describe(int argc, const char **argv,
const char *prefix)
                die(_("No names found, cannot describe anything."));

        if (argc == 0) {
-               if (dirty &&
!cmd_diff_index(ARRAY_SIZE(diff_index_args) - 1, diff_index_args,
prefix))
-                       dirty = NULL;
+               if (dirty) {
+                   refresh_index(&the_index,
REFRESH_QUIET|REFRESH_UNMERGED, NULL, NULL, NULL);
+                   if (!cmd_diff_index(ARRAY_SIZE(diff_index_args) -
1, diff_index_args, prefix))
+                           dirty = NULL;
+               }
                describe("HEAD", 1);
        } else if (dirty) {
                die(_("--dirty is incompatible with committishes"));