Re: Comments in read-tree about #nALT

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Aug 28, 2005, 01:18 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0508271814410.3317@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0508271941090.23242@iabervon.org>

On Sat, 27 Aug 2005, Daniel Barkalow wrote:

> 
> It looks like stage 2 is currently special as the stage that's similar to
> the index/HEAD/working tree.

Ahh, yes. We do actually want that. So yes, we should make only stage 3 have the multiple entries.

> I'd be afraid of confusing everything by removing the uniqueness
> invariant, although I guess not too much does anything with entries in
> stages other than 0. I probably just don't find the index as intuitive as
> you do and as the struct tree representation.

Yes, I find the index to be very nice to work with - it basically allows you to work with multiple trees in one go, instead of working one file at a time. You just slurp in any number of trees (with some trivial rules about which stage they go in), and then you can just walk through each filename and efficiently handle one file at a time without re-doing the tree thing. Very nice.

			Linus