Re: RFH: refactor read-tree

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jul 9, 2006, 15:30 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0607090827430.5623@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0607091630110.29667@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> 
> On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Alex Riesen wrote:
> 
> > Linus Torvalds, Sun, Jul 09, 2006 05:15:41 +0200:
> > > The basic idea is that "branch1" should be your current branch, and it 
> > > obviously is also expected to match (more or less) the current index. So 
> > > you can do a merge by
> > > 
> > >  - reading in "branch1" into the index:
> > > 
> > > 	GIT_INDEX_FILE=.git/tmp-index git-read-tree -m branch1
> > 
> > what is "-m" here for?
> 
> It means that git-read-tree tries to merge the current index with branch1.

Well, the current index always "merges" by just taking the timestamps from it. The actual _content_ doesn't matter for the single-tree case.

For the two- and three-tree case, "git-read-tree -m" will verify that the parts that got changed still _match_ in the index, but for a single-tree "git-read-tree", there's nothing to match against, just the target, so the only thing it does is that for matching index/target-tree entries it will re-use the index timestamps (and other stat info).

			Linus