Re: Why are ref_lists sorted?

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Julian Phillips wrote:

The big thing is probably consistency.

I *really* think we need to sort these things. Otherwise you'll see two totally identical repositories giving different results to something as fundamental as "git ls-remote" just because they didn't get sorted.

So I think sorting is absolutely required, perhaps not so much because it is necessarily "incorrect" without the sorting, but because I think consistency in this area is too important *not* to sort it.

And sorting it really is simple. The fact that we use a O(n**2) list insertion thing that is also probably pessimal for the case of "already sorted" input is just a "hey, it was easy, we never actually hit it in practice" issue.

Absolutely. It might involve changing the "ref_list *" thing into an array of ref_entries, and that will cause a lot of (fairly trivial) changes, but it should all be entirely internal to refs.c, so it's hopefully not painful, just some boring grunt-work.

		Linus