Incremental use of fast-import may cause conflicting notes

Hi.

Background: I have an incremental repository-walker creating a 
corresponding documentation repository from a source repository
that uses git-notes to store its state, a use for which notes
seem very suitable.

Problem: When the number of notes in the root of the notes branch
increases beyond a threshold, fast-import changes the fanout. This 
is as designed, but the problem is that when fast-import is restarted
it won't remember the fanout, and will start writing files in the root 
again. This means that there may be multiple notes-files for the same 
commit, eg both de/adbeef and deadbeef.

This is not what the user expects, and is not good practice, even if it in this case actually works, since the latter is defined to have priority. I'm however not sure if eg fast_import.c:do_change_note_fanout() will do the right thing if/when the fanout is changed again.

The problem is probably due to b->num_notes not being initialized properly when the old non-empty root commit for the notes branch is loaded in parse_from()/parse_new_commit().

My workaround for now is to use filedeleteall and restore all the notes by hand in the first new commit on the notes branch.

Version of git: 1.7.6.4 (gentoo)

Thanks,

-- Henrik Grubbström grubba@grubba.org Roxen Internet Software AB grubba@roxen.com