Re: Re: Re: write-tree is pasky-0.4

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 16, 2005, 02:18 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504151913180.7211@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0504152029410.30848-100000@iabervon.org>

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005, Daniel Barkalow wrote:

> 
> Is there some reason you don't commit before merging? All of the current
> merge theory seems to want to merge two commits, using the information git
> keeps about them.

Note that the 3-way merge would _only_ merge the committed state. The thing is, 99% of all merges end up touching files that I never touch myself (ie other architectures), so me being able to merge them even when _I_ am in the middle of something is a good thing.

So even when I have dirty state, the "merge" would only merge the clean state. And then before the merge information is put back into my working directory, I'd do a "check-files" on the result, making sure that nothing that got changed by the merge isn't up-to-date.

> How much do you care about the situation where there is no best common
> ancestor

I care. Even if the best common parent is 3 months ago, I care. I'd much rather get a big explicit conflict than a "clean merge" that ends up being debatable because people played games with per-file merging or something questionable like that.

> I think that the time spent on I/O will be overwhelmed by the time spent
> issuing the command at that rate.

There is no time at all spent on IO.

All my email is local, and if this all ends up working out well, I can track the other peoples object trees in local subdirectories with some daily rsyncs. And I have enough memory in my machines that there is basically no disk IO - the only tree I normally touch is the kernel trees, they all stay in cache.

		Linus