Re: [PATCH] read-cache: avoid sparse-index expansion for unborn HEAD

From: Sahitya Chandra <sahityajb@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 11, 2026, 21:31 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP=WS+vySE94LZ_4CtEU6Hd99DttpF-49F3OaChTU53hdbzf1g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CABPp-BHLaW6_CxMdPQURN7zMK1p7dEkihFMAkyWvcd2+j7gJqw@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Elijah, Sorry for the long gap, and thanks for the review.

On Fri, Aug 7, 2026 at 9:03 PM Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> If you submit a v2, it's probably worth just being upfront about this
> in the commit message

That makes sense. I'll frame it as a cleanup of the TODO and a reduction in read-cache.c, with no known practical use case.

> I'm curious if the unittesting harness could help here and avoid the
> need for the test helper changes. Is that possible?

I looked into the Clar harness and the existing unit tests. It supports fixtures, but I didn't find repository/index setup helpers to reuse for this case. A unit test may be possible with additional setup, though keeping this in t1092 would let us reuse its sparse repository setup and Trace2 checks to verify that the index stays unexpanded.

Would keeping the shell test and making the helper output clearer for multiple paths be reasonable here?

Thanks, Sahitya