Re: [PATCH 0/8] Add 'ls-files --json' to dump the index in json

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 19, 2019, 12:42 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8BkAPRQNgMQnCkOy3Wrdaj25uK8g-fQ3okpc3BZ33kzrQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <a5d2d2e9-a22f-9ab8-f88f-9c8c8520735d@gmail.com>

On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 6:58 PM Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

>
> On 6/19/2019 5:58 AM, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote:
> > This is probably just my itch. Every time I have to do something with
> > the index, I need to add a little bit code here, a little bit there to
> > get a better "view" of the index.
> >
> > This solves it for me. It allows me to see pretty much everything in the
> > index (except really low detail stuff like pathname compression). It's
> > readable by human, but also easy to parse if you need to do statistics
> > and stuff. You could even do a "diff" between two indexes.
> >
> > I'm not really sure if anybody else finds this useful. Because if not,
> > I guess there's not much point trying to merge it to git.git just for a
> > single user. Maintaining off tree is still a pain for me, but I think
> > I can manage it.
>
> I think we (Microsoft/VFS for Git engineers) would use this tool, as we
> frequently need to diagnose something that went wrong in a user's index.
> Kevin Willford built a tool to search the index and figure out what's
> going on, but I'm not sure it parses all of the new extensions or was
> updated to parse the v5 index.

OK I suggest you try it out and see if it really fits your internal tools. I wanted to balance between manual inspection and automation so the output may not be the best for tools. I also try not to freeze the format for more wiggle room, which would be fine for one-time scripts, but if you want to have real tools depend on it, we may have to look harder at the output format and make sure it's good enough for some time, and have some documentation.

Also, I don't suppose it matters, but just for the record I don't care at all about --json performance. I suppose Jeff's json writer does not cache the entire json output in memory, so dumping giant index files is fine. But some other things, like reading the index with multiple threads, are also disabled.

-- 
Duy