Re: [Census] So who uses git?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Feb 1, 2006, 16:04 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0602010800090.21884@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20060201070847.2021.qmail@science.horizon.com>

On Tue, 1 Feb 2006, linux@horizon.com wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> At the risk of complicating something already very complicated, and
> possibly breaking on Microsoft file systems, that case can be detected
> by reading the directory and noticing that the inode number changed.
> 
> Would it be worth validating the inode numbers (which can be retrieved
> in a batch) even if you don't do a full lstat()?

I don't think it's worth it. It's the unusual case anyway, and it doesn't even really guarantee anything either (the person _could_ just have marked the inode writable - not understanding what is going on, he could have just done a "chmod +w" behind git's back).

Together with the fact that it might not work everywhere, and that I could well imagine that "readdir()" is slow on cygwin too (how does it do "d_ino"? Maybe it has to do a stat() to emulate unix behaviour?), I'm not convinced it's worth it.

I think the whole "assume it's valid" is a crutch - but if we do it, we should make it _really_ fast, because it's also useful for automated procedures that _know_ which files they touch. So we should make it have minimal impact.

		Linus