Re: tree sorting..

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Mar 16, 2007, 23:35 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0703161632270.3910@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070316231329.GA4508@spearce.org>

On Fri, 16 Mar 2007, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

> 
> The entire reason this happened is hysterical raisins.  Your first
> draft of Git had trees as one flat structure, sorting complete
> paths by their memcmp result.  Which is dead simple and worked.

No.

It's *not* historical reasons. That's what I tried to explain.

It's absolutely *required*. Not because of the old flat layout, but because we want read-tree to translate 1:1 into the index.

And the index is a flat file. And it *needs* to be a flat file, because we need to open it and read it efficiently. If it wasn't a flat file, we'd have all the index operations taking as long as the tree operations take.

> Now we are stuck with it.

No. How you need to accept it. It's that easy. It's not "stuck". It's "correct".

That's why I reacted to your irc thing. You seemed to think (and still apparently do) that the sorting is some messy mistake. It's anything but.

So yes, "foo" is *different* from "foo/". You just need to realize that they are two totally different entries. They have absolutely no relationship what-so-ever with each other, except that you obviously must not add one when the other exists.

		Linus