From: Linus Torvalds Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:46:04 GMT Subject: Re: heads-up: git-index-pack in "next" is broken Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Nicolas Pitre wrote: > > Because offsets into packs are expressed as unsigned long everywhere > else (except in the current pack index on-disk format). Until your work, that "unsigned long" was totally just an internal thing that didn't actually bleed into anything else. > > For some structure like this, it sounds positively wrong. Pack-files > > should be architecture-neutral, which means that they shouldn't depend on > > word-size, and they should be in some neutral byte-order. > > But they do. Please consider this code: Right. The pack-file itself. But the code that actually _generates_ it mixes things in alarming ways. > > In contrast, the new union introduced in "next" is just horrid. There's > > not even any way to know which member to use, except apparently that it > > expects that a SHA1 is never zero in the last 12 bytes. Which is probably > > true, but still - that's some ugly stuff. > > This union should be looked at just like a sortable hash pointing to a > base object so that deltas with the same base object can be sorted > together. .. and it sorts _differently_ on a big-endian vs little-endian thing, doesn't it? So now the sort order depends on endianness and/or wordsize. That just sounds really really wrong. Linus